
Class. 



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George Washingt< 



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THE AMERICAN IMMORTALS 




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COFVRKWT ENTRY 


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G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 



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CONTENTS 



I.— INTRODUCTORY 
II.— THE MEN OF THE REVOLUTION 

PAGE 

GEORGE WASHINGTON 3 

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 23 

* JOHN ADAMS 43 

THOMAS JEFFERSON t>6 

III.— THE STATESMEN 

DANIEL WEBSTER 99 

HENRY CLAY 125 

IV.— THE JURISTS 

JOHN MARSHALL 175 

JOSEPH STORY 186 

JAMES KENT 192 

V.— THE MEN OF THE CIVIL WAR 

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 199 

ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT 221 

ROBERT EDWARD LEE 247 

DAVID GLASGOW FARRAGUT . . . '. . .270 

VI.— THE MEN OF LETTERS 

WASHINGTON IRVING 287 

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 303 

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW . . . .317 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON 324 



iv Gcntents 

VII.— THE PREACHERS 

JONATHAN EDWARDS 337 

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNINC ■ -.= 

HENRY WARD BEECHER -.;-, 

VIII.— THE PHILANTHROPISTS AND EDUCATORS 

GEORGE PEABODY 507 

PETER COOPER 374 

HORACE MANN 380 

IX.— THE INVENTORS 

ROBERT FULTON 387 

SAMUEL FINLAY BREESE MORSE 392 

ELI WHITNEY 400 

X.— THE ARTISTS AND NATURALISTS 

GILBERT CHARLES STUART 400 

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON 413 

ASA GRAY 418 

INDEX 423 







ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

George Washington Frontispiece 

From the painting by Rembrandt Peale. Reproduced by permission of 
C. Klackner, N. Y. Copyright, 1S04. 

Benjamin Franklin 24 

From the painting by Duplessis. Reproduced by permission of Foster 
Bros., Boston. 

John Adams 44 

Thomas Jefferson 66 

From the painting by Gilbert Charles Stuart. 

Daniel Webster 10O 

From an etching by F. Johnson. 

Henry Clay I2 6 

From a lithograph. 

John Marshall ,^6 

From the painting by Henry Inman. 

Joseph Story 186 

From an etching by Max Rosenthal. 

James Kent ,02 

From the painting by F. R. Spencer. 

Abraham Lincoln 200 

From a drawing from life by F. B. Carpenter. 



vi Illustrations 

PAGE 

Ulysses Simpson Grant 222 

From a photograph by W. Kurtz, N. Y. 

Robert Edward Lee 248 

From a photograph. 

David Glasgow Farragut 270 

From a steel engraving. 

Washington Irving 288 

Etched by Jacques Reich. From the painting by C. R. Leslie, R.A. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne 304 

From the painting by A. E. Smith. Reproduced by permission of Foster 
Bros., Boston. 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 318 

From the painting by G. P. A. Healy. Reproduced by permission of 
Foster Bros., Boston. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson 324 

From the painting by A. E. Smith. Reproduced by permission of Foster 
Bros., Boston. 

Jonathan Edwards 338 

From a steel engraving. 

William Ellery Channing 35° 

From a lithograph. 

Henry Ward Beecher 356 

From a photograph by Sarony, N. Y. 

George Peabody .368 

From a steel engraving. 

Peter Cooper 374 

From a steel engraving. 

Horace Mann 380 

Redrawn from a steel engraving. 



11 [lustrations vii 

Robert Fulton 388 

From the painting by Benjamin West, P.R.A. 

Samuel Finley Breese Morse 392 

From the painting by Alonzo Chappel. 

Eli Whitney 400 

From the painting by C. B. King. 

Gilbert Charles Stuart 4 1 © 

From a miniature by Sarah Goodrich. 

John James Audubon 4 '4 

From the painting by Henry Inman. 

Asa Gray 4 lS 

From the bust by St. Gaudens in the Botanical Garden, Cambridge. 




INTRODUCTORY 

THE HALL OF FAME AND THE SELECTIONS MADE 

IT is the purpose of this book to present critical 
estimates of the men elected to the New York 
University's Hall of Fame, with so much of 
biography in each case as is necessary to a due 
comprehension of the subjects. It has been the au- 
thor's endeavor to give to the reader an impartial and 
intelligent account of the character, achievements, and 
history of each of the twenty-nine men who have 
been deemed worthy of place in this pantheon, and 
also to make them the subjects of some essays which 
the public may wish to read. The subjects, at any 
rate, are attractively worthy. The occasion of their 
admission to the Hall of Fame gives an opportunity to 
consider them anew. 

These estimates have been written, the author per- 
suades himself, in the broadest spirit of appreciation, 
but without flinching from adverse criticism where ad- 
verse criticism has seemed to him to be justified. His 
sole aim has been to get at the truth and tell it. 



x flntrocmctorp 

In his official book, The Hall of Fame (G. P. Put- 
nam's Sons), Chancellor MacCracken has fully explained 
the origin and purpose of this unique University ad- 
junct. A more succinct account is all that is needed 
as an introduction to the present work. 

The Hall of Fame is a very noble architectural 
structure on the grounds of the New York University, 
with commanding views that can scarcely be matched 
anywhere for their beauty or their nobility. In its 
design and proportions, it is quite unique in American 
architecture. It is the gift of an anonymous generos- 
ity, and its purpose is to stimulate patriotism and 
high endeavor by commemorating those virtues in per- 
sons who have passed away, and by collecting in a 
museum busts, portraits, and mementos of these 
our great. 

Under the terms of the gift, and under the rules 
adopted by the Senate of the University for the ad- 
ministration of the trust, no name is to be admitted 
to inscription in the Hall of Fame except those of 
men or women born within the present territorial 
limits of the United States ; no name except that of 
one who has been ten years dead ; and no name 
which has not been selected by a majority of the 
distinguished jury impanelled to pass upon nomina- 
tions, and afterwards approved by the Senate of the 
University. Indeed, it is not possible to speak too 
highly of the care taken by the generous giver of the 
Hall of Fame, and by the Senate of the University, to 
prevent all mistakes of enthusiasm or of prejudice. 



flntrccmcton? xi 

The jury which made the selections consists of 
one hundred men and women, each eminent in attain- 
ments and position, and together they represent a 
varied activity. To them, by popular nomination and 
otherwise, were submitted two hundred names. 
Each member of the jury was privileged to make fur- 
ther nominations at will, and in that way thirty-four 
additional names were presented for consideration. 
From this list of two hundred and thirty-four names 
each member of the jury was privileged to vote for 
fifty, the number of canonizations that the conditions 
allowed in the election of iqoo. 

It was wisely decreed by the Senate of the Univer- 
sity that no name should be accepted without at least 
fifty-one votes, a majority of the entire jury, whether 
all the jury should vote or not. As a result, only twen- 
ty-nine men were in fact elected to the Hall of Fame, 
and a supplementary election in 1Q02 will be necessary 
to complete the list of fifty assigned to iqoo. Afterthat, 
elections will occur every five years during this century. 

There has naturally been a good deal of criticism, 
in the newspapers and elsewhere, of the results of the 
election. That criticism, however, has not taken the 
form of censure upon any of the selections made. It 
has concerned itself rather with the omissions. 

There is wonder, for example, that while Asa Gray 
was admitted, as the great botanist that he was, by 
fifty-one votes, his mentor and master, John Torrey, 
to whom he always bowed his head in reverence, had 
but a single vote. Apparently, the members of the 



xii Introductory 

jury were imperfectly informed as to the relative dis- 
tinction of American botanists. 

Wonder has been expressed, also, that while Gilbert 
Stuart was elected to a place by ^2 votes, and while 
Copley had }}, Hiram Powers 36, William M. Hunt 
13, and Crawford 0, Benjamin West was not even 
nominated for consideration. Whatever judgments 
the art critics of to-day may form as to the merits of 
West's work, he is, without question, the most 
famous of American artists, in the sense at least of 
being- ranked first by the greatest number of people. 
In his own time, he was one of the most famous 
artists of any country. It was he who first brought 
common sense to bear upon modern historical paint- 
ing. He first insisted upon clothing modern historical 
characters in the costumes of their own time and 
country and position, instead of tricking them out in 
classical garb or mediaeval garniture of person. He 
made this daring innovation in behalf of truth, in 
defiance of Sir Joshua Reynolds's protest, but with 
that great master's full approbation after West had 
demonstrated the artistic practicability of such a sub- 
stitution of truth for tradition. West created a new 
epoch in art. He rose to such eminence that, despite 
his American birth, the British Royal Academy repeat- 
edly elected him to be its President, at a time when 
everything American was anathema maranatha in 
England. Surely Benjamin West ought to have a 
place in the Hall of Fame. Perhaps the election of 
[902 will repair this extraordinary oversight. 



•flntrctouctorv? xiii 

Again, it is difficult to understand why Elias Howe, 
the inventor of the sewing-machine, was not accorded 
a place by the side of Eli Whitney, the inventor of 
the cotton-gin. To these two men, in about equal 
degree, the world owes it that in our time the poorest 
of men and women may be comfortably clad. Eli 
Whitney's invention gave mankind the cheapest raw 
material of clothing that has been known "since ever 
the foundations of the world were laid." Elias Howe's 
invention enormously cheapened the process of con- 
verting this and all other raw materials of clothing into 
actual garments for the warming of human backs. In- 
cidentally, too, Howe's invention of the sewing-ma- 
chine enormously increased the employment and the 
earnings of all sewing-women and of all others who 
are engaged in the manufacture of clothing, while 
Whitney's gave a new lease of life to human slavery. 
If one were asked which of these two inventors did 
most for humanity, it would be difficult to give an 
answer. But surely if one of them deserves a place 
in our pantheon the other does. 

There has been objection made in some of the 
newspapers to the admission of Fulton instead of Fitch 
as the originator of the steamboat, and of Morse 
instead of Henry as the inventor of the telegraph. 
These questions are carefully examined in this volume, 
in the essays that relate to their subjects. It is enough 
to say here, that while Fitch did build and navigate 
a steamboat, as some others did before Fulton launched 
the Clermont, their experiments were so far from. 



xiv flntrobuctorp 

successful that they were abandoned, while Fulton 
carried his to a success of which we hear the applause 
every time a steamer blows its whistle. It was Fulton 
who made steam navigation a fact, with all the won- 
derful consequences of good that have followed. 

In the same way, while Joseph Henry did indeed 
invent a telegraph and send signals by it, in anticipa- 
tion of Morse's efforts, he did not know what to do 
with his discoveries. His experiments were academic, 
not practical ; so were his results. He could ring bells 
at a distance by electrical impulse. He first discovered 
how to send that impulse over long intervening spaces. 
But the bells meant next to nothing, and Henry never 
found out how to send accurate written messages over 
a wire, how to make telegraphy minister to that close 
and easy and quick intercommunication among men 
which is the chief condition of civilization and human 
progress. It was Morse who did this. It was he who 
gave us the electro-magnetic telegraph. A later elec- 
tion will undoubtedly inscribe Joseph Henry's name 
upon a well-deserved tablet in the Hall of Fame. But 
there is no just ground of criticism in the fact that the 
judges selected Morse first as the inventor of practical, 
working, and widely beneficent telegraphy. 

In every such controversy as these two concerning 
the steamboat and the telegraph, the thoughtful man is 
reminded of the controversy concerning the discover)' 
of America by the Norsemen, the Irish, and the Welsh. 
If any of those people discovered this continent, they 
did not know what they had found, and they care- 



■flntrofcuicton? xv 

lessly lost it again ; no accidental, wind-governed dis- 
coveries of theirs in any conceivable way impaired the 
value or lessened the credit of Columbus's deliberately 
planned and painfully executed work. It was not a 
mythical Lief the Lucky or Eric the Red who gave the 
Americas to civilization and made the greatest of all 
liberty-loving nations possible, but the Genoese sailor, 
Christopher Columbus. 

Still another fact, in connection with the selection 
made, deserves mention. The poll is an absolutely 
free one, without distinction as to sex. There were 
three women on the jury of selection, and women 
equally with men, throughout the country, were 
privileged to make nominations. Yet no woman was 
chosen: only eight women were voted for at all, 
and the highest vote given to any one of them was 
20 for Mary Lyon, against 14 for Charlotte Cushman, 
11 for Martha Washington, 7 for Maria Mitchell, 12 
for Dorothea L. Dix, 1 1 for Lucretia Mott, 4 for 
Emma Willard, and 3 for Helen Hunt. Harriet Beecher 
Stowe, of course, had not been long enough dead 
to permit the inclusion of her name in the list of 
nominations. Otherwise the inscription of her name 
in the "Hall of Fame" would have been quite a 
matter of course, as it will be when the prescribed 
ten years after death shall have elapsed. For there 
can be no question in any instructed mind that Mrs. 
Stowe's genius and work have exercised a larger 
influence upon the thought of the American people 
and upon the destinies of the Republic than have 



xvi fntroouctorp 

those of any other woman who has lived and 
worked. 

Another fact that has excited remark is that no 
name has been selected from the list of great physi- 
cians and surgeons who have been celebrated in the 
land. The highest vote given to any man in this 
class was 42 for Benjamin Rush. Valentine Mott had 
18 votes, and I. Marion Sims 28. Dr. Gross, the father 
of American surgery, whose writings on that subject 
are recognized as authoritative in the hospitals and 
medical schools of every enlightened country, was 
not even suggested to the jury or by any of its 
members. Was this because there is not one man 
on the jury who is eminent in medicine or surgery or 
even well informed as to achievements in that depart- 
ment ? 

In literature, personal taste plays so large a part 
in the formation of opinion that no selection could 
possibly have been made, perhaps, which would not 
have encountered much astonished criticism Yet, 
as there were fifty names to be chosen and only 
twenty-nine were in fact selected, and as the test 
was intended to be fame, rather than any critical 
judgment o\ the individual jurors as to merit, many 
have wondered that while Longfellow had 8^ votes, 
William Cullen Bryant received but 40, Edgar Allan 
Poe only 38, John Lothrop Motley 41, James Feni- 
more Cooper 30, John Howard Payne 4, and Thoreau 
a beggarly 3. 

In the class of educators, also, the result of the 



•flntrotmcton? xvii 

voting has awakened some surprise. The choice of 
Horace Mann for a place in the Hall of Fame was quite 
properly a matter of course. The only wonder is that 
he did not receive the full 97 votes cast instead of the 
67 actually given to him. But there is a good deal 
of popular wonder that Dr. Gallaudet's lifelong and 
extraordinary service in the education of the blind — 
the most notable service of that kind that has been 
rendered by anybody anywhere since the nineteenth 
century dawned— did not command for him more than 
14 votes in his class ; that Mark Hopkins had but 48, 
Francis Wayland 24, Theodore D. Woolsey 21, and 
Lindley Murray 7, while several other eminent edu- 
cators were not nominated at all. 

The purpose of this analysis of the vote is not one 
of criticism, but of exposition. Its aim is to show 
simply the points at which criticism, in the public 
prints and elsewhere, has found fault. But fault is 
found exclusively with omissions, and later elections 
will almost certainly repair these errors in so far as 
they are found to be really errors. With the single 
exception that one contentious and intemperately 
partisan newspaper has condemned the admission of 
General Robert E. Lee to the pantheon, there has 
been nowhere a suggestion that any of those chosen is 
unworthy of the honor accorded to him. The twenty- 
one names to be chosen next year will pretty certainly 
include most, if not all, of those who really ought to 
have been chosen in iqoo. And the quinquennial 
elections that are to occur later will doubtless fill up 



xviii flntroouctcup 

the roll to the reasonable satisfaction of every well- 
balanced mind. 

Every reader of these essays will probably find 
something in them with which to disagree. 1 should 
be sorry if it were to fall out otherwise. For that 
would mean that my readers are unthinking people, 
while in all that I have here written my appeal has 
been made to people who think. 

One purpose of this book is to stimulate a just 
appreciation of the men who have made our nations 
history what it is in every department of human en- 
deavor. If in any degree the essays that follow ac- 
complish that patriotic purpose, the author will rest 
satisfied with his work. 




-f&r 



THE MEN OF THE REVOLUTION 



GEORGE WASHINGTON 

WHEN the Senate of the University of the 
City of New York empanelled a jury of 
nearly one hundred distinguished men, 
representing in themselves and their work most of that 
which is best in current American endeavor and 
achievement, and asked them to select the fifty greatest 
Americans of the past for a species of canonization in 
the " Hall of Fame," they were all of one mind as to a 
single name with which to head their lists. George 
Washington alone had the suffrage of every member 
of the distinguished jury. Concerning the supremacy 
of his title to fame, there was no question in any mind, 
no hesitation in any judgment. 

It is quite safe to say that the verdict would have 
been precisely the same if any other hundred Ameri- 
cans of enlightened mind had constituted the jury. 
Nay, more ; if any hundred distinguished foreigners, 
in no close way in touch with our American life, had 
been asked to select our fifty greatest men, it is be- 
yond doubt or question that every one of them would 
have named George Washington first, no matter what 



4 Z\k HDcn of tbc "Revolution 

differences of opinion they might have manifested 
concerning the rest of the list. It is even truer to-day 
than it was when the President of Congress, in 1783, 
said to Washington : "You retire from the theatre o\ 
action with the blessings o( your fellow-citizens ; but 
the glory o( your virtues will not terminate with your 
military command. It will continue to animate the 
remotest ages." 

All this is instructively significant and indicative. It 
aptly suggests not only the universality o\ Washing- 
ton's fame, but also the unquestioned and unquestion- 
able character of the foundations upon which that 
fame securely rests. 

Early in the nineteenth century, and while the pas- 
sions of two American wars still rankled in British 
breasts. Lord Byron touched one of the keys to this 
universal, all-comprehending fame when he wrote : 

"George Washington had thanks and naught beside, 
Except the all-cloudless glory which few men's is 
To free his country.'' 

There was the keynote— self-sacrifice ! The will- 
ing surrender o\ personal advantage, personal ambi- 
tion, personal ease, for the good of others, and for the 
country's salvation, was the central fact o\ George 
Washington's character and career, and it is the rock 
basis o\ his fame as it is the foundation oi all true 
greatness and o\ even' lovable religion that has at any 
period ot the world's history contributed to the up- 
lifting of mankind. If our American admiration of 



(Beorcje Masbington 5 

Washington partakes somewhat of the religious in its 
character, it does so with just reason. 

With every tempting opportunity for self-seeking, 
with every reward before his eyes that ambition could 
covet, George Washington devoted his whole life to 
the patient and toilsome and often severely painful 
service of his country, asking nothing in the way of 
compensation, and treating the great honors that were 
thrust upon him by his countrymen merely as new 
calls of duty, new occasions for devotion, new oppor- 
tunities to render service in behalf of the public weal. 

When he took command of his country's armies, 
and with meagre, uncertain, and often untrustworthy 
means, undertook the seemingly hopeless task of 
throwing off the British yoke, his distrust of himself 
was grandly genuine, and his consecration to his coun- 
try's cause devoutly complete. His first concern was 
for duty, and to that he gave all of love and devotion 
of which his great nature was capable. He rejected 
every suggestion of reward. In the very act of ac- 
cepting his commission, and with it a duty more oner- 
ous than any other that ever fell to an American, he 
refused in advance the pay that Congress offered him, 
and said to that body that he would accept nothing 
whatever for his services,— that he would take no dollar 
of the people's money as pay. He would permit Con- 
gress to do nothing more in a financial way than repay 
his actual expenditures incurred in the conduct of his 
arduous work ; and even for these expenditures — 
amounting to more than fourteen thousand pounds— 



6 £bc fIDen of tbc devolution 

he made no demand until his seven-years' service was 
ended and his great work completely done. 

When the seven years of strenuous war were over, 
and he sought rest in that country life which he had 
always longed to lead, his repose was of brief dura- 
tion. He was again called into the service of his coun- 
try, and again he rendered that service without pay, 
as president of that matchless body of nation-builders 
who framed the Constitution of these United States. 
He even bore his own expenses during the whole time 
of that splendid service, without which it is doubtful 
that we should ever have had a constitution or a repub- 
lic worthy of a place in history. 

Not only was his country ready to reward him for 
services that were felt to be of inestimable value, but 
the separate parts of it, the individual States, pressed 
upon him offers of compensation which he might hon- 
orably have accepted. Thus, upon his first retirement 
to Mount Vernon, after surrendering his commission, it 
was foreseen that he must exercise a great hospitality 
there. It was foreseen that his countrymen would 
crowd upon him as guests eager to do him honor, but 
incidentally "eating him out of house and home." 
In this situation the Supreme Council of Pennsylvania 
instructed the delegates of that State in Congress to 
call attention to the threatened infliction and to sug- 
gest that the nation should in some way take from 
Washington's shoulders this enormous burden, the 
nation itself assuming it by means of some national 
award. All this was done officially, and when the 



(Bcorac Masbinoton 7 

official documents were laid before Washington he 
was busily engaged in an effort to adjust his own 
affairs so as to "make both ends meet." During his 
long absence in the service of the country his estates 
had become involved in many ways, and on his return 
he found more than a little difficult)- in providing ways 
and means for the discharge of his obligations. He 
was, in fact, financially embarrassed. Yet he rejected 
the offered intervention in his favor, as Irving says, 
"most gratefully and respectfully," " jealously main- 
taining the satisfaction of having served his country 
at the sacrifice of his private interests." 

As for the question of entertainment, he solved 
that in a truly democratic way. To a friend he wrote : 
"My manner of living is plain, and 1 do not mean to 
be put out of it. A glass of wine and a bit of mutton 
are always ready for any caller, and such as will 
be content to partake of them are always welcome. 
Those who expect more will be disappointed." 

Still more greatly was he embarrassed in [785, w hen 
his native State, Virginia, sought to reward him for 
another and more special service. He had devised a 
scheme of canal construction which promised to render 
Virginia the great commercial State that New York is. 
and the scheme had been adopted. It was fell by 
the Legislature and people of the State that the man 
who had conceived this splendid enterprise should 
have a share in the profits of it. By unanimous vote 
of the Assembly of Virginia, fifty shares of stock in 
the Potomac Company and one hundred shares in 



8 Cbc m>cn of tbc devolution 

the lames River Company were appropriated for 
Washington's benefit. Irving tells us of his embar- 
rassment in presence of this offer in the following 
words: "To decline so noble and unequivocal a 
testimonial of the good opinion and good will of his 
countrymen might be construed into disrespect, yet he 
wished to be perfectly free to exercise his judgment 
and express his opinion in the matter without being 
liable to the least suspicion of interested motive." He 
solved the difficulty by declining to accept the shares 
for his own personal benefit, while agreeing to accept 
them for devotion to a great public and educational 
use which he had long cherished as a hope. He asked 
the Legislature, instead of giving this property to him, 
to devote it to the establishment of institutions of 
learning planned by himself, as a means of solidifying 
the country, eradicating sectional prejudices, and breed- 
ing a great race of men devoted broadly to the up- 
building of the Republic. 

And once again, when he had completed his service 
as President of the Constitutional Convention, and had 
retired to Mount Vernon to seek that rest and enjoy- 
ment in country life for which from his youth up he 
had longed, his countrymen demanded a still further 
service of him. Reluctantly, and with much misgiv- 
ing as to his qualification for affairs of state, he con- 
sented at their call to serve as the first President of 
the United States, and to conduct the affairs of the 
new Republic in that first and formative period, on 
the direction of which the entire future of the nation 



©coroe TKHaebinflton 9 

depended. He thus again relinquished his well-earned 
repose and gave up the care of personal affairs that 
sorely needed his supervision, to take weary burdens 
upon his tired soul. Yet his first official act as Presi- 
dent was to ask Congress to make no appropriation 
for a salary for himself. He said to the House of 
Representatives in his Inaugural Address : 

"When I was first honored with a call into the service of my 
country, then on the eve of an arduous struggle for its liberties, 
the light in which 1 contemplated my duty required that 1 should 
renounce every pecuniary compensation. From this resolution 
1 have in no instance departed. And being still under the im- 
pressions which produced it, 1 must decline, as inapplicable to 
myself, any share in the personal emoluments which may be 
indispensably included in a permanent provision for the executive 
department ; and must accordingly pray that the pecuniary esti- 
mates for the station in which I am placed may, during my con- 
tinuance in it, be limited to such actual expenditures as the public 
good may be thought to require." 

These acts of generous self-sacrifice in devotion to 
the public service were indicative of the lofty patriotism 
that inspired Washington's soul and guided his life. 
Yet they do not constitute the marrow of the matter. 
They are not in themselves the grounds upon which 
all mankind to-day stand ready to vote him into a su- 
preme place in any Hall of Fame that may be estab- 
lished anywhere upon earth. Behind and beneath and 
above and beyond all of these acts of patriotic self-sac- 
rifice was the wonderful character that gave them birth 
-a character which made the man great whether he 
willed to be great or not ; a character which exaltedly 



io £bc HDcn of tbe "Revolution 

inspired all his acts in every circumstance of life ; a 
character which determined all his campaign plans and 
dictated the conduct of all his battles, the tenor of all 
his state papers, his attitude toward every man and 
every policy that had anything to do with the country's 
fortune or future. 

To define such a character or to describe it must be the 
despair of any writer who essays the task. To suggest 
its salient points is perhaps less difficult. From the 
day of his birth to the day of his death it was always 
the resolute purpose of George Washington to do his 
full duty as God gave it to him to see his duty, with- 
out any regard whatsoever to personal consequences. 
Even that instinctive concern for his own credit with 
his countrymen, which troubles every public man 
upon occasion, did not restrain him from giving high 
command to Horatio Gates when the giving of such 
command seemed likely to promote the public inter- 
ests, although Gates had been, within Washington's 
perfect knowledge, a prime mover in the Conway 
cabal for Washington's destruction. He believed it to 
be for the public interest to give this command to 
Gates, and he put aside every other impulse in that 
behalf. And when Gates disastrously failed before 
Camden, and was meditating suicide as the only way 
out of his military disgrace, it was Washington who 
wrote him a letter over which he wept like a child 
or a woman, because of its generosity and its tender, 
brotherly sympathy. Perhaps no other man who ever 
exercised military command would have been capable 



(Scoroe Washington n 

of the great and unflinching generosity that Washington 

displayed in this case. 

Again, after General Charles Lee had played Wash- 
ington false, and, — as later-discovered documents 
have revealed, though Washington did not know that 
fact,— had deliberately negotiated with the enemy, for 
a treachery as infamous as Arnold's, Washington sought 
to soften to that personal enemy and mercenary traitor 
the wounds inflicted through his own agency in the 
peremptory exercise of duty. Still again, when Bene- 
dict Arnold had secured asylum in New York after his 
treason, and Washington sent Sergeant Champ on a 
perilous expedition for his recapture, the great fatherly 
chieftain had such regard for Arnold's previous and 
superb services that he gave peremptory orders that in 
no case was the traitor to be physically harmed ; that 
rather than execute irregularly upon him that sentence 
of death which all mankind have always been agreed 
in assigning to the Judas Iscariot of the Revolution as 
his well-earned deserts, Sergeant Champ should him- 
self suffer any hardship and accept any fate that might 
befall him. 

And so in brief throughout. It was Washington's 
exalted character rather than the particular deeds 
through which that character manifested itself— the 
inspirations of his lofty soul rather than the mere 
achievements of his hand, though these were very 
great— that won for him his supreme place, not only 
in the regard of his countrymen but equally in the 
estimation of all enlightened men throughout this 



.2 Che Men of tbe devolution 

earth of ours. He was great because he was great, and 
not merely because he had the good fortune to achieve 
great things. 

This distinction cannot be too strongly emphasized 
in any just estimate of Washington's character and 
career. In every act and circumstance of his life, 
whether as son or husband or adopting father ; 
whether as subordinate executing the will of another, 
or as commander demanding obedience at the hands of 
others ; whether in commending and rewarding merit 
where he found it, or in censuring neglect of duty ; 
whether in apportioning blame among the blamewor- 
thy, or taking it upon himself as a just meed — in all 
that he did or left undone, in all that he said or left 
unsaid, Washington's grandly rounded character was 
the controlling influence, the dominating force, the in- 
spiration of his every act, the final answer to all ques- 
tions concerning him. 

It is that chiefly which so powerfully appeals to the 
minds and hearts of men in contemplating him as a 
figure in history. Other soldiers have planned and 
fought more brilliant campaigns than any that Wash- 
ington conceived— unless we exceptthetrulyNapoleonic 
operation that he marked out and carried to completion 
for the destruction of Cornwallis and the practical end 
of the British power in America. Other statesmen, 
perhaps, have had a larger and firmer grasp than he upon 
the policies that must be pursued by great nations in the 
conduct of their affairs, — though that is doubtful,— but 
no man in all history ever brought to bear upon prob- 



(Beorge Masbinoton 13 

lems of generalship, or of statecraft, or of personal con- 
duct, so lofty a purpose, so self-sacrificing a patriotism, 
so superb a common sense, or so unflinching a deter- 
mination to do at every step the duty that lay before 
him without concern for consequences. As soldier, 
statesman, patriot, and man, he was by innate character 
the most perfect type of what God may be supposed 
to have intended that a man should be, that has ever 
yet been born upon this earth. And his life was the 
inescapable corollary of his character. 

Unlike some other heroes of popular American ado- 
ration, Washington was born to high social place and to 
honorable name. There was nothing in his origin to 
serve as a foil to his achievements, nothing of diat 
dramatic contrast in his life's story which so greatly 
emphasizes the things done and attained by Lincoln, 
Franklin, and some others. Washington was born to 
an inheritance of the best. When he came into beinu\ 
on February 22, 1712, the country was still completely 
in a thraldom of aristocratic tradition, and George 
Washington was born an aristocrat of aristocrats. His 
family was peculiarly well descended and well con- 
nected. It was also well-to-do, measured by the 
standard of the time and country. The primrose path 
of idle and luxurious indulgence lay plain and open be- 
fore him had he chosen to walk in it. Perhaps it is 
quite as great proof of his high quality of mind and 
character that he chose instead the thorny path of 
public service, the arduous life which he in fact led, as 
it is to the credit of others that, in spite of early 



14 Gbc flDcn of the "Revolution 

disadvantages, they raised themselves to eminence and 
honor. Surely he whose ambitions seem to be satisfied 
in advance by birth and early circumstance, but who 
puts aside personal ease and converts his inherited 
advantages into opportunities for strenuous, self-sacri- 
ficing public service, is deserving of quite all the honor 
we give to him who, born to poverty and obscurity, 
refuses to rest content with his birthright, and advances 
his own personal fortunes by similar devotion to high 
aims. It is as greatly to the credit of George Wash- 
ington that he refused to live the easy, well-fed life of 
an aristocratic Virginia planter, and chose instead to do 
a strong man's share in the arduous work of his time, 
as it is to the credit of Lincoln or Franklin or any other 
that he resolutely raised himself out of that low estate 
in which he was born. In the one case equally with 
the other, the honor lies in the fact that the man con- 
cerned chose the higher life of strenuous and often 
painful endeavor instead of resting content, as the 
catechism puts it, " in that state of life to which it had 
pleased God to call him." 

In Washington's case, the temptation to rest con- 
tent was peculiarly great. A sufficient fortune, which 
needed only his attention to keep it sufficient, was his 
from the beginning. A home climate, as nearly perfect 
as any that exists on earth, the peculiarly pleasurable 
activity of that planter's life for which he always 
longed, and which he always reluctantly surrendered 
at the call of duty, the friendship of all about him who 
were well placed, including many of high birth and 



6cor$c Masbinoton 15 

even of title— everything, in short, that could tempt a 
man of his physical, mental, and moral nature to a 
self-indulgent life of dignified and honored ease pre- 
sented itself to his mind in fullest force. His position 
in the community in which he lived was of the highest. 
His friends were the honored ones of earth in that time 
and country. All that there was of social pleasure was 
freely his to enjoy at will. All of honor that his neigh- 
bors or the authorities of his province could bestow 
upon any man was at his command. The planter life 
itself was peculiarly inviting to a man of his robust 
nature. It involved only so much of work as an active 
man of robust physique craves as a delight. It offered 
all of pleasure that a reasonable mind could desire— the 
chase, the magistracy, the lordship over broad acres, 
the best of social intercourse, that leisure which lends 
itself to culture, the opportunity for travel, the intimate 
friendship of those best worth knowing within his 
horizon — everything, in fact, that could tempt the mind 
to content and the soul to repose. 

Yet at no time in his life did George Washington 
long remain in his little kingdom of Mount Vernon to 
enjoy these inherited opportunities of personal satis- 
faction. From his youth to the end of his life his years 
were given to hard work in distant fields, with only 
now and then a brief period of repose, a slender oppor- 
tunity to look after his personal affairs— and all without 
compensation or recompense of any kind, save that 
"all-cloudless glory " of which Byron wrote. 

But if Washington's birth and family and associa- 



1 6 Ebe fIDcn of tbc "Revolution 

tions were aristocratic, his educational opportunities 
were as slender as those of any man whose career is 
commonly cited to us as typical of achievement under 
difficulty. He attended an " old field school," kept by 
one of his family's tenants, and later was, for a brief 
time, under another master, but he never had the ben- 
efit of instruction in any higher school. He learned 
from his rude masters so much of reading, writing, and 
arithmetic as a slenderly-educated teacher could impart 
to him, and at the age of fifteen even this instruction 
ceased. From his second master he had learned a little 
of geometry and of the practical field work of land sur- 
veying before he reached his sixteenth year. That 
was all of systematic education that George Wash- 
ington ever had. "He never attempted the learned 
languages," says Irving, " nor manifested any inclina- 
tion for rhetoric or belles-lettres." 

One month after he attained the age of sixteen the 
active career of this remarkable man began. He was 
just sixteen years of age when Lord Fairfax sent him 
into the wilds of what was then the West, to survey 
his great possessions there. And to this commission 
was added the authority and duty of public surveyor. 
It was an arduous service, and one attended by much 
of hardship and no little danger. It was also, in the 
highest degree, a responsible service, involving as it 
did the vital interests not only of the great landed 
estates of the Fairfaxes, but also those of their tenants, 
those of the province, and those of a multitude of im- 
migrants who were settling on the frontier. It was 



(Seorcje Masbinoton 17 

such a service as is usually committed only to a man 
of mature years and ripe experience ; yet so obvious 
were the qualifications of this mere boy for the work 
to be done that the task was confidently entrusted to 
him with the sanction of William and Mary College 
and of the colonial government. And so well did 
the lad discharge his duties that the records of his 
surveys remain to this day undisputed in their 
authority. 

From the hour of this juvenile appointment Wash- 
ington was looked upon not only as a fully grown 
man, but as a man of distinction and one specially 
qualified for difficult public service. At twenty, he 
was made chief executor of his dead brother's will, 
and placed in control of the affairs of a great estate. 
Two years earlier, at the age of eighteen, he had been 
appointed by the Royal Governor to be adjutant- 
general of his district, and charged with the perplexing 
duty of organizing the militia and placing Virginia in 
a state of defence, in preparation for that French and 
Indian war which was obviously impending, and which 
so soon afterward broke out. 

At twenty-one Washington was selected by Gov- 
ernor Dinwiddie as the fittest man in all the province 
to head a mission to the Ohio country, charged with 
the delicate duty of winning the allegiance of the In- 
dians there from the French, and, if possible, of per- 
suading or compelling the French to abandon their 
claims in that quarter. It was a mission of the utmost 
difficulty and delicacy, as well as one of great danger, 



is Gbc fiDen of tbe "Revolution 

and, as it proved, one involving almost incredible hard- 
ship to the youth who undertook it. Washington 
conducted it with such masterly discretion and cour- 
age, that from the hour of his return this youth of 
twenty-one was regarded by the authorities and peo- 
ple of the provinces as indisputably a foremost man in 
military skill, in diplomacy, and in statecraft. He was at 
once appointed— mere boy that he was— Commander- 
in-chief of Virginia's forces, and when, a little later, an 
army was organized for an expedition to the troubled 
Ohio country, Washington was commissioned Lieuten- 
ant-Colonel, and placed second in command to an Eng- 
lish officer of distinction. The death of his superior 
officer soon left the young man in complete charge of 
the difficult and perilous enterprise. 

Again, when the trained soldier, Braddock, was 
sent out from England to lead an expedition against 
Fort Duquesne, Washington, though only twenty-three 
years of age, was made second only to him in military 
authority. And when Braddock's arrogant rejection of 
Washington's advice led to his disastrous defeat and 
death, it fell to young Washington to extricate the 
beaten and broken army from its perilous position. 
This he did so skilfully that when, a little later, a larger 
army was created for the defence of the frontier, 
Washington was, quite as a matter of course, placed 
in supreme command of it. 

From the time of his first mission westward, Wash- 
ington had insisted upon the reduction of Fort Du- 
quesne as a necessity to the defence of all the western 



(Beorge Washington 19 

border, and to the retention of any Virginian or Eng- 
lish claim to dominion in that quarter. To that end 
Braddock's expedition had been directed, with disas- 
trous incompetency, and it was reserved to Washing- 
ton at last, in command of the advance guard of a later 
expedition, to plant the British flag over the ruins of the 
fort that had so long been a menace to all English 
interests west of the Alleghanies. 

He was then only twenty-six years of age, yet he- 
was everywhere recognized as the ablest military com- 
mander in the colonies, one well fitted to instruct, in 
the art of border war, the trained officers sent out from 
England, had they been willing to learn of him as of 
the master that he was. 

During his absence on this last western campaign, 
the people of his district had chosen young Washing- 
ton over three competitors to represent them in the 
House of Burgesses although he had declined to avail 
himself of a permit to go home and look after his po- 
litical interests. He had scarcely settled himself at 
Mount Vernon with his newly wedded wife, after re- 
signing his military commission with intent thereafter 
to lead the planter life that he so greatly loved, when 
he was summoned to Williamsburg to attend a ses- 
sion of the Legislature. On his first appearance in 
the Legislature there occurred one of the most inter- 
esting events in his career, illustrating in an extraor- 
dinary way the extent of the admiration this mere 
youth had won from his countrymen. The House 
had, by a unanimous vote, instructed its Speaker 



20 Gbc m>en of tbc "Revolution 

to welcome young Washington publicly and in the 
most conspicuous way he could. When Washington, 
knowing nothing of the honor planned for him, en- 
tered the legislative hall to take his seat, the Speaker 
arose, and, in the name of the Colony, presented thanks 
to Washington for his brilliant military services, in an 
address so warmly eulogistic that, for the only time in 
his life, George Washington lost his self-control and fell 
into confusion of mind. Stunned and bewildered by 
the extraordinary welcome extended to him, he stam- 
mered helplessly in an effort to make reply. It was 
said by one who was present on that occasion that he 
" could not give distinct utterance to a single sylla- 
ble." The Speaker came to his rescue most master- 
fully. He called out: "Sit down, Mr. Washington ! 
Your modesty equals your valor, and that surpasses 
the power of any language I possess." 

Is it any wonder that a man who, at so early an age, 
had won such recognition for high character and dis- 
tinguished soldiership, should have been kept busy for 
the rest of his life in answering the calls of his coun- 
trymen to high service ? Is it surprising that when, at 
last, the country accepted war with England as an inev- 
itable necessity, this man, now in his maturity, was 
chosen by the common voice to be " Commander-in- 
chief of all the forces raised or to be raised," for the 
defence of American liberty ? And considering the well- 
nigh incredibly discreet way in which he conducted 
the war for independence to a successful conclusion, 
in spite of meagre means, in spite of a divided loyalty 



(Bcoroe TKllasbinflton 21 

on the part of the people, in spite of treachery and trea- 
son among his subordinates, in spite of confused coun- 
sel in a Congress that lacked power to provide for even 
the most imperative needs— considering, in short, the 
wonder-story of George Washington's achievements in 
the Revolutionary War, was it not quite inevitable 
that his countrymen should look to him for guidance 
when they decided to make an experiment in govern- 
ment such as had never been made before in all his- 
tory ? And is there occasion for surprise in the fact 
that, in spite of a divided and discordant Cabinet, in 
spite of those sectional and social jealousies that had so 
greatly disturbed him during the Revolutionary War, 
and, above all, in spite of the feeble uncertainty of the 
public mind, he succeeded, during eight years of sore 
soul-travail, in setting this Republic on its feet and 
laying securely the foundations upon which has been 
built the greatest, freest, strongest, and in human 
affairs the most significant nation of which the his- 
tory of mankind furnishes any record or takes any 
account ? 

Not any of the glory that halos the name of George 
Washington is less than fully deserved. Not any of 
the adoration that is given to his character is in the 
least degree extravagant or excessive. Of him— abso- 
lutely alone among mankind— may we prudently speak 
in unrestrained superlatives. He was, beyond all 
question, the greatest man that God ever gave to a 
deserving or undeserving world. 

The story of his campaigns need not be recounted 



22 £be nDcn of tbe "Revolution 

here. It is a commonplace of education. It would 
be equally a waste of space to tell, in this essay, of his 
eight years of civil administration as President. That, 
also, is a story familiar to every tolerably well-instructed 
boy in our public schools. 



<?& 




BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN was the apostle of Com- 
mon Sense. In his life, in all his work, in his 
dealings with men and measures, in his at- 
titude toward women and marriage, and even in 
his attitude toward himself, he made common sense 
always the dominant note, the controlling influence, 
the guiding principle of his every word, and act, and 
thought. To this sole god of his adoration he stood 
ready always to make sacrifice of his dignity, his inter- 
ests, and his dearest desires. To it, as to a court of last 
resort, he made his final appeal in every case. To it 
he referred every question that arose in his mind, and 
from the judgments of common sense he permitted no 
exception to be taken by sentiment. 

This rule of life he applied equally in science, phil- 
osophy, statecraft, diplomacy, and personal affairs, 
and in every case he unflinchingly abided by the re- 
sults. In some instances his loyalty to common sense 
was manifested with a whimsical humor almo 
tesque in its exaggeration and perversity. For example. 
he tells us that at one time, freethinker that he was. 



24 Gbc HDcn of tbe "Revolution 

he regularly attended a church and contributed liber- 
ally to its support, because the minister of it preached 
sermons that intellectually interested and morally stim- 
ulated him. Presently, some pestilently knowing 
brother found out and proved that the minister was 
preaching sermons not his own, "cribbing" them from 
some old book, written by some old divine. In con- 
sequence, the clergyman was dismissed from his 
pastorate and another installed in his stead. This 
other preached sermons that were his own, and Frank- 
lin found them dull, whereupon he ceased to attend 
the church, though he continued to contribute to its 
support. He ceased to attend upon the ground that 
he preferred a clergyman clever enough to purloin 
good sermons, and preach them attractively, to one 
stupid enough to deliver dull discourses of his own 
instead. 

There was here, perhaps, a failure of moral percep- 
tion on Franklin's part, unless we accept his statement 
of the affair as a grim jest,— just as in another case 
there was a curious failure on his part to recognize 
military proprieties. 

In that other case he found himself in command of a 
military post, with a military rank of which any other 
man would have been jealously mindful. Presently 
there joined him a man with no military rank at all, but 
possessed of a military training and a military expe- 
rience which Franklin had not. Instantly Franklin 
issued to this man a commission, and turned over the 
command to him upon the simple common-sense 



Benjamin jfranfclin 25 

ground that, as there was military work to be done, 
this trained military man was titter than himself to 
carry it to success. The proceeding was extremely 
irregular, of course, and in a well-organized army it 
might have drawn Franklin into difficulty with a court- 
martial. But at any rate it was an exhibition of ex- 
alted common sense and of the lofty patriotism that 
seeks public results rather than personal honors and 
dignities. 

In precisely the same way, when European sci- 
entists, engaged in a study of electricity, sent out an 
invocation for his help, and with it some apparatus, 
carefully prepared according to the ill-informed text- 
books of that time, Franklin threw aside the apparatus 
and devised simple, common-sense appliances of his 
own for testing the question at issue— which was 
whether or not a flash of lightning, is in simple fact, an 
electrical discharge ; and, with his common-sense de- 
vices he settled that question for all time, with the inven- 
tion of the lightning-rod as a corollary to his discovery. 
He, also, by equally simple devices, finished the work 
of discriminating between positive and negative elec- 
tricity, traced, for the first time, the path of storms 
across this continent, thus making the work of our 
modern meteorologists possible, and pointed out those 
peculiarities of the Gulf Stream, the knowledge of 
which has made the thermometer ever since a ship- 
saving and life-saving instrument of navigation in the 
approach of ships to the American coast. 

Poor Richard's Almanac, the work upon which 



26 3be flDen of tbc "Revolution 

Franklin's literary and popular tame chiefly rests, con- 
sisted, in its literary part, simply of a setting down of 
common sense on paper. 

Here, indeed, Franklin's common sense sometimes 
betrayed itself into indiscretions that are hurtful rather 
than helpful to the fame of the author. His maxims 
were worldly wise in an extreme degree — so worldly 
wise, indeed, as now and then to impress a sensitive 
mind as almost sordid. 

They were maxims pointing the way to success 
with accuracy and certainty, it is true, but the success 
to which the way was pointed was always material 
in its character, and nearly always had reference to the 
getting of money or its equivalent. There is much in 
Poor Richard to inspire industry, thrift, economy, 
and the like, with an eye to the personal welfare of 
the man practising the precepts. There is very little, 
indeed, to inspire the higher wisdom of self-sacrifice 
or to teach the nobler lesson that there are objects in 
life of greater value than gain,— purposes that should 
be preferred to personal prosperity. 

Yet it is certain that Franklin was not insensible to 
these higher ideals. His life was a long one, and the 
greater part of it was devoted in a grandly self-sacrifi- 
cing way to the service of his country— a service that 
cost him very much of personal inconvenience and 
discomfort at a time of life when personal ease and 
comfort are apt to mean much to a man. Is it not 
possible that Franklin had, in fact, much more of that 
sentiment which his common sense rejected and his 



Benjamin jfranftlin 27 

humor ridiculed than he was willing to admit, even 
to himself? 

Yet there was certainly a regrettable lack of senti- 
ment in his make-up. He fell in love, while yet 
scarcely more than a lad, with Deborah Read, the 
lady who afterwards became his wife. He engaged to 
marry her, and went away on a voyage to London 
to secure the means of setting up a printing-office in 
Philadelphia. Presumably sentiment toward her con- 
stituted a part of his impulse in this venture. But 
when he reached London and found that his Phila- 
delphia patron's promises of money and credit for his 
enterprise were so much breath and nothing more, he 
wrote only one letter to his sweetheart, in which 
he told her, with no great show of emotion, that he 
was likely to be detained in London for an indefinite 
time, and, during the year and a half of his stay there, 
he never wrote to the girl again, or in any other way 
manifested any tenderness of sentiment or sympathy 
towards her. It seems never to have occurred to him 
that she might be suffering a distress of mind which a 
loving letter from him would relieve. He seems, on 
his own part, to have accepted the dissolution of their 
marriage engagement quite as a matter of course and 
a thing of no particular consequence, just as he might 
have accepted the fact that a change of residence 
rendered it necessary to cancel an engagement for the 
employment of a servant or a housekeeper. 

It is true that he afterwards married this woman 
and lived with her as his wife for forty-four years. 



28 Gfoc flDcn of tbc "Revolution 

But his neglect of her during and for years after this first 
London trip, and his extraordinary lack of sentiment 
when his god, Common Sense, decreed their separation, 
had meantime driven her into marriage with a worth- 
less fellow, who soon deserted her and not long after- 
ward died. Six years after Franklin so indifferently 
dismissed her and turned from love of her to the 
delights of London life, he found her a widow and 
married her. Apparently they lived together in a com- 
mon-sense sort of happiness during the forty-four years 
of their married life, and when he came to die, Frank- 
lin manifested a certain tender sentiment towards this 
devoted wife by directing that his body should be 
interred by the side of hers, under a single slab, bear- 
ing the simple inscription of their names—" Benjamin 
and Deborah Franklin." But, during the long years 
that he spent in London after their marriage as agent 
of the colonies, contending with great ministers of 
State for the rights of the American people, and reap- 
ing a rich harvest of honors from great universities 
and world-famous learned societies, that eagerly vied 
with each other in heaping honors upon him, it seems 
never to have occurred to Franklin to summon this 
loyal and loving wife to his side, to share with him the 
glory of his recognition. She died in 1774, before that 
era of Franklin's greatest honor when, as the diplomatic 
representative of the young Republic, he literally "stood 
before kings," the most honored diplomat in the 
world, the most highly esteemed scientific investi- 
gator, enjoying a universal homage such as has been 



Benjamin Jfranfeltn 29 

paid to no other man who lias lived in this country of 
ours. Honors were showered upon him by kings and 
exalted dignitaries, who gave attentive heed to his 
words of counsel. Learned societies besought him 
to lend them his name. Financiers furnished millions 
of money to the still struggling Republic upon his 
simple representations. At every social function 
grand dames and courtly gentlemen struggled with 
each other for the honor of a word of recognition from 
him. The very shopkeepers of Paris left their custom- 
ers to wait while they went to their doors to make 
obeisance when Franklin went by. The gamins of the 
Paris streets stood aside in a reverence wholly un- 
wonted to them when he appeared, and doffed their 
head-gear to him, when they happened to have any 
head-gear to doff. 

Deborah Franklin was in her grave before these 
glories came upon her husband. Let us try to believe 
that had she lived till that time Franklin would have 
summoned her to his side to share in their enjoyment, 
though he did not offer her a share in that earlier glory 
of his London life. 

Yet it seems doubtful that he would have done so, 
in view of what he himself has revealed to us of his 
attitude toward the woman he made his wife. He 
tells us in his autobiography that after his first stay of 
eighteen months in London, during which time he had 
written to Miss Read only his one cold letter of dis- 
missal, he returned to Philadelphia and presently set 
up a printing-house of his own. He renewed friendly 



30 Gbc flDcn of tbc 'Revolution 

relations with the Reads, but in no way sought to 
renew his closer relations with Deborah, now the 
widow of the dissolute fellow whom Franklin's neglect 
had prompted her in a mood of vexed desperation to 
marry. Six years passed before he thought of that, 
and then he thought of it only as a matter of expe- 
diency and common sense. He had, meantime, made 
love, in a way, to the daughter of a man who rented a 
part of his house. But when the question of marriage 
with that young woman arose, Franklin made up his 
mind to make marriage " pay," as we say in our time. 
He demanded as a dowry with his bride, a sum of 
money sufficient to discharge the debt that he still 
owed upon his printing-house. That being refused, 
he broke off the negotiations and declined afterwards 
to consider the proposals pressed upon him for their 
renewal. 

But he tells us in his singularly candid autobiog- 
raphy that this incident turned his thoughts again 
toward marriage as a practically desirable arrange- 
ment, and upon the grossest grounds of prudence and 
personal expediency, which he unhesitatingly sets 
forth in his account of himself, but which may not be 
reported here because of their lack of delicacy, he 
decided to take a wife. Knowing nobody more readily 
available for this purpose, he decided to renew the old 
engagement with the widow who had been Miss Read, 
and he thus married the sweetheart of his youth. It 
is a cold-blooded and rather repulsive story, as Frank- 
lin himself related it in his old-age chronicle, and it 



Benjamin jfrannlin 31 

presents his contemptuous hick of sentiment in a 
scarcely less than shocking light. 

Nevertheless, Franklin had sentiment. When Brad- 
dock was stopped in his campaign for want of wagons, 
Franklin not only undertook to supply them at cost of 
great labor and without a cent of profit to himself, but, 
in the process of doing so, spent a small fortune of his 
own money, which he afterwards and with difficulty 
got back only in part — all for patriotism. Whenever, 
in Philadelphia, a public need was to be served, Frank- 
lin freely spent his time and money, and all his in- 
genuity in serving it. In this way he created the first 
charity hospital in America and the first fire-company, 
established the University of Pennsylvania, founded 
one of the most notable learned societies in this re- 
public, created the first great circulating library in 
the land, and, throughout a long lifetime, lent himself, 
his genius, his money, his industry, his time, and 
whatever else was his, to the service of his country 
and his fellow-men, under an impulse of purely senti- 
mental patriotism and public spirit. 

It seems, therefore, that this man, so strangely 
lacking in passion and sentiment, so far as personal 
concerns were involved, was possessed of an exalted 
and inspiring sentiment of patriotism. And for the 
country it was well that his sentiment took such direc- 
tion. For certainly no man except Washington did 
more than he to achieve that independence which 
made possible and actual this foremost republic of 
which history takes account, this greatest nation that 



32 Gbe HDcn of tbe "Revolution 

ever existed in the world. Patriotism was his one 
passion, and yet at one time, when he was the agent 
of the colonies at London, Franklin brought himself 
under grave suspicion of a lack of that impulse, by 
his excessive earnestness in behalf of a reconciliation 
between the colonies and the mother country— he 
even going so far as to urge that the colony of Massa- 
chusetts should pay for the tea dumped into Boston 
harbor by the celebrated "tea party." 

Better perhaps than any other man, even in this 
land of self-made men, Franklin, in his career and 
achievements, illustrated certain truths that cannot be 
too strongly impressed upon youths whose educational 
opportunities are meagre. The first is, that he who 
has learned to read has in his hands the master key 
to all doors that lead to learning. The second is, that 
every man who is educated at all is self-educated ; 
schools, colleges, and universities render incalculable 
assistance in the work of self-education, but in the last 
analysis the man who would be educated must edu- 
cate himself, and there is no limit to the possibilities 
of achievement in that way. 

Franklin had, if that be possible, even slenderer 
school opportunities than Lincoln enjoyed. He quit- 
ted his masters at ten years of age, after a scant two 
years of attendance upon a horn-book school. He 
never had another hour's tuition at the hands of any 
master, yet as journalist, writer, philosopher, states- 
man, original scientific investigator, diplomatist, and 
thinker, he achieved a position that might well have 



Benjamin jfranklin 33 

been envied by any highly educated specialist in any 
one of these departments of learning or endeavor. So 
great was the fame of his learning that, in spite of his 
colonial residence, in spite of three thousand miles of 
ocean over which no steamer pushed her prow and 
under which no cable flashed intelligence, in spite of 
prejudice, and in spite of the lack of community of 
thought and sympathy between Europe and America, 
this man of no schooling was made a Fellow of the 
Royal Society of Great Britain and a member of every 
learned society in Europe, while the universities of St. 
Andrews, Edinburgh, and Oxford rivalled each other in 
their eagerness to confer upon him those honorary 
degrees that crown learning and scholarly achievement 
with academic recognition. In the meantime, as has 
been already related, Franklin had founded an institute 
that is still everywhere recognized as a learned society 
of high authority, and a university that ranks to-day 
with the foremost in this or any other country. 

These were his lesser achievements, however. Sci- 
ence and literature and learning were to him avoca- 
tions rather than vocations. They were his intellectual 
amusements and pastimes, while the labors of state- 
craft and diplomacy, and his great share in the creation 
of this republic of ours, constituted the serious busi- 
ness of his long life. 

Franklin was three score years and ten of age when 
he signed the Declaration of Independence. He had 
reached a time of life when he was entitled to seek 
rest from his labors and leave to other and younger 



34 £be flDen of tbc "Revolution 

men the completion of the great task of nation- 
building to which he had already so grandly con- 
tributed. But he faltered not nor failed. Old man 
that he was, he cheerfully took up the new and very 
arduous labors that the birth of the Republic rendered 
necessary. All that wonderful career of diplomacy 
in which he won courts to his will and compelled kings 
and great ministers of State to his purpose lay later in 
his life than the period fixed upon by the psalmist as 
the limit of human activity. It was as a man of 
advanced age that he did his greatest work— greatest 
in its influence upon his country's future, greatest in 
that illustration of his genius upon which his fame 
securely rests. It was this old man who persuaded 
the King of France to an alliance with the new-born 
republic. It was he who, on the scant and uncertain 
credit of a confederacy of revolting colonies, without 
authority to levy a tax or power to enforce a decree, 
succeeded in borrowing those millions without which 
the American armies must have been disbanded and 
the American struggle for independence must have 
gone down to an inglorious grave, to be reckoned 
thenceforth and forever one of the worst and most 
disastrous blunders recorded in all history. 

In brief, it is not too much to say that, next to 
Washington, this old man, Benjamin Franklin, did more 
than any other to achieve American independence and 
make our republic possible. And the greater part 
of this he did after he had passed his three score years 
and ten. 



Benjamin jfranfclin 35 

It is not extravagant to say that Franklin, first of 
all Americans, conceived the thought of what this 
country must be, and under what form of government 
the States must ally themselves if the confederation 
was ever to become a great, free, and self-respecting 
nation. As early as 1754 he brought forward and 
strongly urged a scheme for the close union of the 
thirteen colonies under a general government, em- 
powered to lay taxes, make treaties, and do whatever 
else might concern the public weal, while leaving the 
several colonies free to legislate, according to their own 
good pleasure, upon all matters of purely local concern. 
His plan was, in all essential particulars, identical 
with the present Constitution of the United States. 
But the colonies were not then ready to accept it. 
They were so far jealous of their individuality that 
even when the strenuous conflict for independence 
came, they could not be persuaded to vest any ade- 
quate powers in the loosely constituted central gov- 
ernment of the confederation, and, by consequence, 
from beginning to end of the Revolutionary War, they 
were beset by difficulties and dangers of the gravest 
character, every one of which they would have escaped 
if Franklin's scheme of a union, instead of a mere 
confederacy, had been adopted. And when at last, 
after the war was over and independence achieved, 
the necessity for "a more perfect union " was pressed 
home to all enlightened minds by daily and dis- 
astrous experience, the great convention which, under 
Washington's guidance, finally framed the Federal 



36 Zlyc flDcn of tbc "Revolution 

constitution, could do no better or more wisely than 
adopt in substance the scheme which Franklin had 
wrought out and urged upon acceptance a third of a 
century before. 

Franklin was born in Boston, 17 January, 1706. He 
was the son of a poor tallow-chandler, the youngest 
son and the fifteenth child in a family of seventeen. 
There lay in such circumstances small chance of a 
bringing up or education to anything better than the 
commonest kind of manual labor, such as men with 
dwarfed and undeveloped brains may do as well 
as any others. Franklin's father did indeed at one 
time plan to send the gifted boy to Harvard College 
and have him trained for the Ministry. Fortunately, 
the father could not afford the expense. Fortu- 
nately, we say, because, with his inquiring, sceptical 
turn of mind, Benjamin Franklin as a clergyman would 
have upset New England thought long before the 
time arrived for such upsetting to be safe and whole- 
some ; and fortunately, too, because his training for 
the ministry in the theological schools of that dark 
age would almost certainly have unfitted Benjamin 
Franklin for the broadly liberal intellectual work that 
he was destined and fitted by the peculiar qualities 
of his mind and character to do, and for his great 
doing of which, his country and all mankind are 
beyond measure indebted to him. 

As has been said already, Franklin had a scant two 
years of schooling, and at ten years of age he went 
to work cutting wicks and filling candle-moulds in his 



Benjamin jfranhlin 37 

father's little shop. Never afterwards did he have an 
hour's instruction. But at ten years of age he had 
learned how to read, and with that open sesame to 
all the arcana of knowledge in his possession, he made 
himself in the end the most thoroughly and variedly 
educated man of his generation. Throughout life 
he was a reader with an omnivorous and insatiable 
intellectual appetite. He made himself familiar with 
all of literature upon which he could lay his hand, 
not only in English but in Latin, French, Italian, and 
Spanish also— for he taught himself all those languages 
as he taught himself all that was then known of 
physical science, and of whatever else might minister 
to his unquenchable thirst for knowledge. 

He soon quitted the chandlery and became appren- 
tice to his brother, a printer. In this position he 
learned the twin trades of compositor and pressman, 
learning both so thoroughly that a few years later, 
when he was in London, he was able to teach the 
best printers there much that they neither knew nor 
dreamed of about their art. And he learned some- 
thing else during this apprenticeship— something of 
vastly greater consequence to the world if not to 
himself, than any skill in printing could be. He 
learned how to write with that trenchant vigor, that 
extraordinary simplicity and directness, and that 
singular lucidity of statement and aptness of illustra- 
tion, which gave to his writings throughout life a 
persuasive influence scarcely parallelled in his time 
and country. 



38 XTbc HDen of tbe devolution 

Whatever Franklin did he did in a superior fashion, 
whether it was mechanical or intellectual, scientific or 
commonplace, literary or of homely domestic charac- 
ter. The printer's devil, who set more type and set 
them better than any journeyman in the shop could 
do, was also able to write the strongest papers that 
appeared in his brother's newspaper, and, surrepti- 
tiously securing the acceptance of these his essays, he 
had the pleasure of hearing them attributed by the 
pundits of the town to the leading minds in the colonies. 

But Franklin was a man not born to submit himself 
to servitude. He quickly quarrelled with his brother, 
broke his indentures at the time when he was capable 
of rendering the best service to his fraternal master, and 
ran away to Philadelphia, where, all unknown to him, 
his great career awaited him. Years afterward he 
made abundant amends to his brother for the time and 
service he had filched from him, and the brother was 
more than satisfied. 

Franklin quickly made a place for himself in Phila- 
delphia, by reason of his superior skill in his trade, his 
extraordinary alertness of mind, the gentle courtesy of 
his manners, his singular grasp of questions of public 
import, his resolute self-discipline, his uprightness and 
sincerity, and his manifest ability to take care of 
himself. 

He was still scarcely more than a boy when, de- 
luded by the golden promises of the charlatan gov- 
ernor of the province, he went to London, as already 
related, to buy a printing outfit, and found himself 



Benjamin franklin 39 

stranded there without money or friends or credit of 
any kind. 

It was a year and a half before he returned, but 
when he did so he begun that extraordinary career of 
diversified public service which ended only with his 
life. As clerk of the Legislature, and afterwards for 
many years a commandingly influential member of that 
body, he impressed himself mightily upon the public 
policies of the period ; as a delegate to the successive 
continental congresses, he was even more influential in 
directing the thought of that troubled time. As post- 
master-general for the colonies, he brought order out of 
chaos, and in simple fact created that system of mail 
service which, developing with increasing facilities, 
has become one of the wonders of our modern time. 
As the editor of an influential newspaper, as a forceful 
and very daring pamphleteer, and still more as a 
shrewd organizer of popular sentiment for the accom- 
plishment of desirable ends, he was all this while the 
most potent intellectual force in Pennsylvania or in 
any of the colonies. By a wily use of his common 
sense he instituted the paving of streets in Philadel- 
phia, just as in London he had first taught men the 
possibility and the desirability of street-cleaning. His 
services in establishing a public library, a hospital, a 
fire-extinguishing service, a learned society, and a uni- 
versity of world-wide repute, have already been suffi- 
ciently mentioned for the purposes of this pnper. 

So also have been his services in electrical, meteoro- 
logical, and marine science. It is worth while to add 



4o Gfoc flDcn of tbe "Revolution 

to the chronicle of these achievements the fact that 
when that association which is supreme in France, so 
far as scientific research is concerned, decided to in- 
vestigate the pretensions of Mesmer and his hypnotic 
performances, it was the untrained American, Ben- 
jamin Franklin, who had never had a lesson in science 
in all his life, to whom, chiefly, the task of making 
the searching inquiry was delegated. 

When the troubled times of Revolution came — 
when the stupidity of Lord North and the unteachable 
arrogance of George 111. had made compromise and 
reconciliation clearly impossible, Franklin's functions as 
agent of the colonies in London were manifestly at an 
end, and he returned to his native land in time to 
serve in the Congress which put forth the Declara- 
tion of Independence as the great charter of American 
liberty. 

A little later followed that period of splendid diplo- 
matic service, during which Franklin made France our 
ally, secured for his country the money necessary for 
the carrying on of the war, and at last laid the firm 
foundations of that final treaty of peace with Great 
Britain which ended the war and made American Inde- 
pendence an accomplished fact. In all this extraor- 
dinary diplomatic work, Franklin's guiding principle at 
every step was that masterful Common Sense which 
we have spoken of as the keynote of his character. 
Not only did he govern himself by it, but in all his 
negotiations he appealed to it in the minds of princes, 
potentates, and ministers of State, as to a principle 



Benjamin jfranfclin 41 

that even the wiliest state craft could not blink or 
dodge, or in any other way escape. 

All this while Franklin was growing old. He was 
nearly eighty years of age when he negotiated with 
Prussia the treaty which, first of all conventions be- 
tween civilized nations, contained a provision looking 
to the abolition of that species of piracy known as 
" privateering." 

Having brilliantly completed the great diplomatic 
work that had occupied his energies for so many years, 
the old man, now in his eightieth year, besought the 
Congress of his grateful country to release him and let 
him come home for the rest that he had so nobly 
earned. 

He came back in [785, but there was no rest for him 
yet from public service. He was immediately chosen 
President of Pennsylvania, and was re-elected to that 
arduous post in 1786 and 1787. Then came the con- 
vention that framed the Constitution of the United 
States, under which the Republic has grown so great. 
Franklin was made a member of that august body, 
and the work of his life was fitly crowned when the 
convention adopted and the States ratified a system 
of Federal government substantially identical with that 
which he had devised and urged thirty-three years 
before. 

In 17Q0 Franklin died, full of years and full of honors. 
His labors of a public character, and for the benefit of 
the country and of humanity, continued to the end. 
It was only four weeks before his death that he put 



42 



Gbc flDen of tbe "Revolution 



forth one of the strongest, wittiest, and most convinc- 
ing of those polemic pamphlets which had been his 
favorite weapon of debate throughout his life. 

The country has had no wiser man than Benjamin 
Franklin among its sons, and certainly it has had none 
who rendered more, or more willing, or more effective 
service to the land of his birth and to the liberty that 
he so greatly loved. 




JOHN ADAMS 



IN his character, in his mind, and in his career, John 
Adams was a far less picturesque personage than 
some of those great contemporaries of his with 
whom he wrought mightily in the work of building 
this nation. He was a type of that sturdy patriotism, 
that unflinching courage, and that solid ability which 
contributed perhaps quite as much to the work that 
was done in the Revolution and in the formative 
period of our Government, as did the more brilliant 
qualities of other men. 

He was a sound lawyer, thoroughly trained, and he 
shared with such men as Jefferson, John Jay, and John 
Marshall, an abiding faith in the absolute and ultimate 
righteousness of those fundamental principles upon 
which the law of all English-speaking peoples is 
founded. 

He was a man of unusual intellectual courage. He 
was one of the very first among the revolutionary 
group to perceive clearly that reconciliation between 
the colonies and Great Britain was hopelessly impossi- 
ble, and from the very moment that he perceived this, 



44 Sbe flDcn of tbe Revolution 

he resolutely opposed petitions and the other lame de- 
vices o\ the time tor patching up a peace "where 
there is no peace.'' as Patrick Henry phrased it. 

In the same way, this upright, downright, honest, 
truth-telling man introduced new methods into di- 
plomacy when he was sent to Europe as one of the 
ministers o\ the new Republic. He went straight at 
his object in even case and frankly set forth what 
he wanted. He told the truth, to the surprise of 
the Count de Yergennes. and of that wily diplomat's 
representative at The Hague. He had an abiding con- 
tempt for shams and false pretences. He hated a lie 
with all the intensity o\ a strong and honest nature. 
He loved the truth because it was the truth, and quite 
irrespective of any advantage that might be gained by 
the telling of it. 

Like the other gre:it men of that time. John Adams 
sacrificed much oi personal prosperity and gain to the 
public service. Like them he gave up ease and com- 
fort, absenting himself for years from the joys o\ that 
family life which he loved, and denying himself asso- 
ciations and intellectual pursuits which were very dear 
to him. in order that he might answer the call of his 
country to public duty. His contribution to that ser- 
vice was one of the most conspicuous and most last- 
ingly valuable rendered by any man of his time. 

John Adams was born in 1735, the son of a pros- 
perous small farmer. Unlike Washington, he had the 
advantage of a systematic academic training, and he 
was graduated from Harvard College in 1755. A tew 



John Adams 






' 










'I /' " A//////./ 



3obn aoame 45 

years later he entered upon the practice of the law, 
gaining recognition rather for solid ability and sound 
learning in his profession than for any particular bril- 
liancy of genius. Like Franklin and Jefferson, he held 
religion in high respect, but believed little in the dog- 
mas of theology. He actively rejected the authority 
of church in any form, as they also did. He had been 
educated for the pulpit, but his state of mind clearly 
unfitted him for that vocation. That was a time when 
authority was everything in religion, and Adams utterly 
rejected authority. One of his biographers quotes him 
as asking : " Where do we find a precept in the Gospel 
requiring ecclesiastical synods, convocations, councils, 
decrees, creeds, confessions, oaths, subscriptions, and 
whole cartloads of other trumpery that we find reli- 
gion encumbered with, in these days ? " Clearly, the 
law offered a fitter career for a young man thus inquir- 
ingly minded than the ministry did, in that aggressively 
polemic age. 

Adams's interest in public affairs began early and 
lasted until his death. Braddock's defeat affected him 
painfully. He foresaw and foresaid that the future of 
this country must depend upon its success in securing 
liberty to expand westward of the Alleghanies, and 
even to the Mississippi, which was then the Ultima 
Thule of ambitious imaginings in the way of national 
grandeur. He boldly predicted what has come to 
pass, namely, that with this liberty to extend English- 
speaking civilization westward, our numbers would in 
another century exceed those of Great Britain herself, 



46 Sbc flDcn of tbc 'Revolution 

a prediction which has been fulfilled twice over and 
more. 

A little later there came that series of aggressions 
upon the rights and liberties of the people of the 
colonies which resulted ultimately in the revolution 
and in independence. From the very first, Adams 
was strongly and outspokenly on the right side. 
Against the Stamp Act, against the writs of assistance, 
against any and every aggression, his patriotism was 
at once angry and insistent. As early as 1761, he 
heard James Otis deliver his splendid diatribe against 
British aggressions, and in his old age he wrote of that 
occasion, "every man of an immense, crowded audi- 
ence appeared to me to go away, as 1 did, ready to 
take arms against writs of assistance. Then and there 
was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the 
arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the 
child. Independence, was born." 

When the Stamp Act was passed and the superior 
courts refused to wink at its violation as the inferior 
courts had done, John Adams was quite naturally 
chosen one of the advocates to conduct the appeal 
against that injustice, and from the first — he delivering 
the opening argument— he took the bold ground that 
the Act was in itself null and void, by reason of its 
violation of the fundamental principles of English lib- 
erty. He then asserted as a principle that doctrine, 
which was afterwards embodied in the Declaration of 
Independence, that there could be no just or legal 
taxation without the representation of the people taxed 



3obn Hfcams 47 

in the legislative body that assumed to tax them. 
Though less startlingly presented, his point was iden- 
tically the same as that which Jefferson made when 
he declared that the Virginia Legislature had as clear a 
right to pass laws for the taxation of men in England 
as the British Parliament had to enact laws for the 
taxation of men in Virginia. 

Adams busied himself, also, at that time in writing 
for the public prints, in advocacy of those principles of 
liberty which he held so near to his heart. Writing, 
in those days, either in the public prints or in the form 
of pamphlets, was an unremunerated occupation, but 
it was, at the same time, one of the most effective 
means open to any man of impressing his thought 
upon the community and stirring men to action. 
Adams made free use of it throughout his life, just as 
Franklin did. 

In this and other ways, he made himself so danger- 
ous an antagonist to British aggression that the royal 
authority in the colony of Massachusetts thought to 
buy him off. To that end, it offered him a lucrative 
office in the line of his profession, the acceptance of 
which must have silenced him as an opponent of the 
pretensions of the crown. Adams quite clearly under- 
stood what the bait meant and refused it. 

From that time forward, Adams's activity in behalf 
of American liberty — as speaker, writer, legislator, 
legal adviser, and plain patriot— was incessant. It is 
not the purpose of the present essay to enter into any 
detailed account of the proceedings which thus brought 



48 Z\k flDen of tbe "Revolution 

him more and more to the attention of his countrymen 
as a leader in that revolutionary movement which was 
presently to culminate in war. In the first Continental 
Congress, Adams made himself at once the leader of 
those who stood for colonial rights against the aggres- 
sions of the British Parliament, the British Ministry, 
and the British Administration in this country. That 
Congress was called for the sole purpose of protesting 
against these wrongs. And it was John Adams who 
drew the resolutions of protest, and advocated them 
with no shadow of fear or hesitation, and with no hint 
of a disposition to compromise any right of the Ameri- 
cans, though at that time, and in that body, there 
were strenuous advocates of compromise, and the fear 
was great that extreme measures might provoke dis- 
astrous retaliation. Adams had already made up his 
mind that a longer continuance of the colonies in a 
state of dependence upon Great Britain meant and 
could mean nothing less than a sacrifice of liberty. 
He was already, in 1774, an earnest advocate of abso- 
lute independence, and of bloody war as a means of 
securing it, if that should be necessary. To this end, 
he filled the public prints with essays that still live 
and still reflect the most advanced sentiments of his 
time. 

His printed utterances were fearless in the extreme. 
They were daring almost to desperation in the bold- 
ness of their contentions. They were the work of a 
man whose patriotism asked no favors and shrank 
from no possible retribution. 



3obn Hfcams 49 

When the second Continental Congress assembled, 
Mr. Adams was recognized as one of the foremost 
men of New England, and New England had already 
put an army into the field to besiege the British 
in Boston. Believing, as he did, firmly and unflinch- 
ingly that the time had come when, in Patrick Henry's 
language, "We must tight," and "There is no elec- 
tion," he moved the appointment of George Wash- 
ington to be "Commander-in-chief of all the armies 
raised, and to be raised " in defence of American 
Liberty. 

This was in every way a wise and politic thing for 
him to do. Washington was, without doubt or ques- 
tion, the one commander tit to conduct a war so un- 
equal and to bring it to a happy conclusion. But not 
only so ; there were jealousies and bickerings, and 
grave distrusts between the several colonies that 
tended to disturb that harmony among them which 
was so imperatively necessary to the success of their 
struggle, and nothing could have gone further to 
allay those jealousies, to silence those bickerings, and 
to remove those distrusts, than for John Adams, the 
representative of Massachusetts and the foremost man 
of New England, to move this selection of George 
Washington, the chosen hero of Virginia, as the com- 
mander of those forces which were first of all to rescue 
Boston and afterwards to free the country of its yoke. 
It is probable that Washington would have been made 
Commander-in-chief upon the motion of someone else 
if Adams had not thus taken the initiative, but it is 



so Zbc flDen of tbe IRcvolutton 

conceivable, at least, that some other and less fortunate 
choice might have been made. In any case, it is 
certain that, in thus nominating Washington for the 
command and securing his appointment, John Adams 
rendered to the country a service that has rarely been 
matched. For had any other than a conspicuous New 
England delegate so nominated him, the jealousies and 
sectional prejudices which were then so dangerous 
would not have been allayed in anything like the same 
degree in which his action accomplished that purpose. 

It would require greatly more space than that 
which is proper to this paper to recount the multi- 
farious services of Adams at this time. Like Wash- 
ington, and Jefferson, and Franklin, he was everywhere 
present where there was duty to do. Even while 
serving in the Continental Congress he served also in 
his State's Legislature, in local councils, and especially 
in that revolutionary body organized in Massachusetts 
to take possession of government there, and thus prac- 
tically to declare the independence of the colony. 
About this time he was appointed to the office of 
Chief-Justice, but wisely omitted to take his seat, for, 
learned in the law as he was, John Adams was of radi- 
cal intellectual tendency, had an uncommonly caustic 
habit of utterance, and was in other ways less fitted 
for the calm deliberations of the bench, than for the 
intellectual conflicts of the senate, the bar, and the 
public press. 

In the spring of 1776, Mr. Adams secured the pas- 
sage of an Act of Congress recommendino- all the 



3obn Hfcmms 5 1 

colonies to form governments for themselves, inde- 
pendent of those thrust upon them by the British 
ministry. Into the preamble with which he introduced 
this resolution, Mr. Adams put in fact a declaration 
of independence. That preamble declared unequivo- 
cally that the American people could no longer give 
allegiance to any government deriving its authority 
from a royal decree ; that the king had withdrawn his 
protection from the colonies, and that the people of the 
colonies must therefore look out for themselves. 

In June of that year, Richard Henry Lee, of Vir- ' 
ginia, moved in Congress that a formal declaration be 
made of the absolute independence of the colonies, 
and of their right to be recognized as free and inde- 
pendent States. John Adams seconded this resolution, 
and when it came to debate a few weeks later he ' 
championed it through Congress, leading the debate 
in the absence of Mr. Lee. Thus were Virginia and 
Massachusetts— the leading Southern and Northern 
colonies in influence— brought together to act for inde- 
pendence with a force then irresistible in the colonies. 
For these two were everywhere recognized as domi- 
nant among the newly forming States. Their public 
men were everywhere looked to for counsel and 
guidance. Even South Carolina, with the almost 
matchless John Rutledge for her chief representative, 
made her bow to Virginia and Massachusetts as the 
acknowledged leaders in the Revolution. It was a 
happy coincidence that a chief among Virginians and 
a chief among the representatives of Massachusetts 



52 Z\k flDcn ot tbc "Revolution 

should thus be associated in the advocacy of this 
final decisive act of revolt and resolution, just as it 
was a fortunate thing that the nomination of George 
Washington to be Commander-in-chief of the revolu- 
tionary armies had come more than a year before, not 
from a Virginian, or from any man of the Middle States, 
but from John Adams, a representative of Massachu- 
setts and o\ that sentiment which had led New Eng- 
land to put an army of sixteen thousand men into the 
tield for the purpose of driving the British out o\ their 
capital, Boston. 

Before the Declaration of Independence was finally 
signed. Congress created a Board oi War and Ord- 
nance, designed to provide the military ways and 
means necessary for the now inevitable conflict, and 
John Adams served as its chairman till after that 
splendid achievement o\ American arms, the capture 
of Burgoyne and his army at Saratoga. 

At this time, the British representatives in America 
were busying themselves with belated and futile at- 
tempts at reconciliation. These were conducted with 
every device o\ deception that wily ingenuity could 
invent, and often by means that closely resembled 
the attempted corruption of American officers. Many 
men in Congress and out of it — still cherishing that 
hope which Adams had long ago abandoned, that re- 
conciliation might even yet be possible — were de- 
ceived by these manoeuvres. Not so John Adams. 
Like Patrick Henry of Virginia, and John Rutledge, of 
South Carolina, he steadfastly opposed every negotia- 



3obn Htmms 53 

tion of the sort, as insincere, delusive, and likely to be 
fruitful of harm. Nevertheless, Adams was usually 
appointed one of the commissioners to negotiate in 
every such case, and it was fortunate that this was 
so, because his sagacity always penetrated the purpose 
of the enemy and baffled it, and because, when it was 
baffled, his shrewdness of speech was potent to recon- 
cile others to the abandonment of the futile endeavor. 

It was in recognition of these qualities that Adams 
was chosen in 1777 to replace Silas Deane as the repre- 
sentative of the United States in France. His sagacity, 
his diplomatic skill, and his unfaltering patriotism spe- 
cially fitted him to deal with the problems presented 
there. Before his arrival in France in 1778 the alliance 
between the most arbitrary and despotic of European ~L[ 
kings and the most aggressively liberty-asserting of all 
republics had been formed. But Adams from the first 
and almost alone saw through the shams that lay 
behind this alliance. He quite well understood that 
it was self-interest and not a love of liberty which 
prompted the French King to lend aid to the colonies 
in their effort .to separate this great imperial domain 
of ours from British rule and British influence. He 
saw clearly that the aid of France was never likely to 
go beyond this selfish purpose. But at this time 
Adams's diplomatic service was brief. He found and 
corrected great abuses in the management of Ameri- 
can affairs in Europe, and himself recommended the 
dissolution of that triumvirate— consisting of himself, 
Benjamin Franklin, and Arthur Lee — which then had 



54 Sbc flDen of tbc "Revolution 

charge of the Republic's interests at Paris. Under his 
advice, Arthur Lee was sent to Madrid, Franklin was 
left sole Minister at Paris, and Adams himself was 
called home. 

A little later he was sent again to Paris as a com- 
missioner to treat for peace with Great Britain. It 
was then that his shrewd judgment of men and their 
motives, and his wily caution rendered the public of 
the United States one of the greatest services recorded 
in his career. He profoundly distrusted the Count de 
Vergennes, and he shrewdly penetrated that unscrupu- 
lous minister's designs. He saw clearly that it was no 
part of Vergennes's purpose to permit a treaty of peace, 
or even to allow him to suggest such a treaty to the 
British Government. Vergennes did not understand 
and could not believe that any treaty made at that 
time could result otherwise than in some form of 
reconciliation and re-union between Great Britain and 
her revolted colonies. His purpose being the weak- 
ening and, if possible, the destruction of the British 
power, he was bent upon it that no such reconciliation 
should occur. He little understood Adams's attitude or 
that of the Congress that had sent him abroad to seek 
peace, with the absolute and unequivocal recognition of 
American Independence as its fundamental condition. 

Adams, in his turn, saw clearly that it was the 
purpose of Vergennes, whenever a treaty should be 
made, to "cabin, crib, confine" the young Republic in 
ways that should forever forbid it to grow into great- 
ness, and incidentally to sacrifice its dearest interests 



3ofon Hfcams 55 

to the aggrandizement of France's other ally, Spain. 
It was his purpose to shut the Americans out from 
expansion west of the Alleghanies, to make of the 
Mississippi Valley a Spanish territory, and forever to 
exclude American vessels from the Newfoundland fish- 
eries. In brief, Adams clearly saw that the professed 
friendship of the mediaeval French monarchy for the 
radical young American Republic was purely selfish, 
and that it contemplated nothing further of benefit to 
the Republic than the securing of a feeble indepen- 
dence, confined within narrow bounds and subject to 
restrictions of the most paralyzing kind. 

Fortunately for our country, no treaty was made at 
that time, for the obstinate British Government had 
not yet learned its lesson. But without doubt Adams's 
early perception of the French attitude and purposes 
bore rare fruit when the treaty of 1783 was ultimately 
made. 

Although Adams's suspicions somewhat annoyed 
Franklin, who believed in Vergennes, they opened that 
great statesman's mind to conditions which threatened 
the Republic with danger, and without question the 
shrewd bargaining of Franklin in the later negotiations 
was largely inspired by Adams's warning. 

In 1780 Adams was sent to Holland to negotiate 
a loan. He there adopted Franklin's habitual device 
of writing and publishing a series of articles and letters 
as a preparation of the popular mind in that country 
for the proposition he was about to bring before its 
government and its bankers. There he encountered the 



56 Gbc flDen of the "Revolution 

wiles of Vergennes again, exercised through his am- 
bassador at The Hague, the Duke de la Vauguyon. 
By dint of his blunt and courageous truthfulness, 
Adams forced that shrewd diplomat to help where he 
had intended to hinder the American purpose. The 
result of his mission there was the formal recognition 
of the United States as an independent nation by the 
Government of Holland, and a little later the negotia- 
tion of a loan of $2,000,000, and a treaty of amity and 
commerce. Mr. Adams himself always regarded this 
success of his at The Hague as the best achievement 
of his life in the service of his country, and perhaps it 
was so. 

At the conclusion of this matter, Mr. Adams was 
again summoned to Paris to act with Franklin and Jay 
in negotiations with Great Britain for the recognition 
of American independence and for peace and commerce 
between the two nations. The negotiation was in 
itself difficult and its perplexities were enormously 
increased by the attitude of the Count de Vergennes, al- 
ready indicated and explained. Franklin seems at this 
time to have been more or less hoodwinked by Ver- 
gennes and by his own great kindliness toward the 
French, inspired by their assistance at a critical time in 
the fortunes of the new Republic. But Jay and Adams 
resolutely stood together in opposing the French 
policy, and, as a result, the treaty, when it was made, 
imposed no restriction upon our country's western 
expansion and left to our hardy fishermen a full right- 
not a privilege but a right — to participate freely in 



3obn Ht>ams 57 

those Newfoundland fisheries whose proceeds have so 
greatly enriched New England and incidentally the 
whole Republic. 

It is simply impossible to estimate the service thus 
rendered by Adams and Jay to the future of the Repub- 
lic. That service indeed made the glory of the Repub- 
lic possible. If the reader will imagine the thirteen 
new States as an independent republic, shut off on the 
south by the Florida border, bounded on the north 
by the Canadian frontier, and forever forbidden to pass 
beyond the Appalachian chain on the West, he will 
understand how insignificant would have been the 
future of the United States. It is to these men that 
we owe it, that the great States of the Middle West 
and the rich commonwealths of the far West and of 
the Pacific coast are ours to-day— that the corn grown 
in Illinois, and the pork produced there, that the cot- 
ton of Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana, that 
the cattle that swarm over the prairies of Texas, that 
the grain of Kansas and Nebraska, that the wheat of 
Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas, that the cattle 
and the gold and the silver of Montana, Idaho, Colo- 
rado, Arizona, and Nevada, that the fruits of Utah and 
California and Oregon, are all products of this great 
nation of ours— and that nowhere on our borders have 
we an enemy capable of interfering or disposed to 
interfere with that wonderful progress which has in 
little more than a century raised us from the condition 
of feebly dependent colonies into that of the richest, 
greatest, strongest nation upon earth, the feeder of 



58 £bc flDcn of tbc "Revolution 

the world, as well as the inspirer of the world's ideas 
of human liberty. Of course, the treaty negotiated 
by Adams, Jay, and Franklin did not provide for all 
of this, or for the half of it, but it made all of it pos- 
sible. Had the Republic been confined to the region 
east of the Alleghanies, as the Count de Vergennes 
desired, the Louisiana purchase would have been 
impossible, and all that great accession of territory 
formerly belonging to Mexico would have been be- 
yond the reach even of our aspirations. 

It is only fair to the great men of that time thus 
to estimate the results of their industry and genius, 
even though some of those results were not at the 
time contemplated by their foresight. And it is to be 
said to the credit of Adams and Jay that they nego- 
tiated this treaty in direct violation of certain of their 
instructions from Congress. 

It is, perhaps, fortunate that there were no ocean 
cables or fast-sailing steamers in those days. Other- 
wise the sagacity of these two men might have been 
restrained by the dulness, the hesitation, the timidity, 
of those who had authority to give them their orders. 
For Congress did not understand, as Jay and Adams 
did, the attitude of the French Ministry. With a 
frankness and generosity of mind wholly foreign to the 
experience of the French court, Congress was disposed 
to regard the French alliance as one of sentiment, 
where in fact it was one of the grossest selfishness. 
Congress was, therefore, moved to instruct its diplo- 
matic agents to preserve a quixotic regard for French 



3obn Hcmms 59 

interests — to undertake nothing in the way of nego- 
tiations without the concurrence of "the ministers of 
our generous ally, the King of France." It instructed 
them that they were to govern themselves entirely by 
the advice of the wily diplomat who was playing fast 
and loose with American interests and making the 
Republic a mere pawn upon the chess-board of 
European politics. 

Adams and Jay had the courage as well as the 
sagacity to disobey these instructions, and to make for' 
the Republic the best terms they could— and mightily 
good terms they were— with the mother country, with 
little or no regard to the plans, wishes, and advice of 
the French Minister of State, who sought to make of 
American interests nothing more than counters in the 
game that he was playing. 

This duty ended, Adams very greatly desired to re- 
turn to his native land. His ambition was of the very 
highest, and his opinion of himself was an exalted one. 
He foresaw that at home, rather than abroad, he had 
a chance for that recognition and reward which he 
deemed to be his just due. But the time was unpro- 
pitious for the reaping of those rewards, or the realiza- 
tion of those ambitions. And, moreover, there was still 
much strenuous work for Adams to do as a diplomatic 
representative of his country in Europe. In one diplo- 
matic capacity and another he remained abroad until 
1788, and on his return, after a ten-years' service, he was 
publicly thanked by Congress for patriotism, persever- 
ance, integrity, and diligence in his various missions. 



6o £be Qfocn of tbc "Revolution 

In the meantime, the new Federal Constitution had 
been adopted, to replace that loose coalition of the 
States which had so conspicuously failed of its pur- 
pose to make one nation of the thirteen separate com- 
monwealths. The time was at hand when a President 
must be chosen for the new and stronger Republic — 
one under whose guidance its destinies might be 
launched, and its future foreshadowed in present ac- 
tion. With that excessive appreciation of himself 
which had always been a part of his character, John 
Adams regarded himself as conspicuously the fittest 
man for this high honor and function. 

In his utterances at that time he clearly manifested 
impatience with the contrary judgment of his country- 
men in favor of George Washington as the first pre- 
siding officer of the Republic. He was wholly unable 
to discover a sound reason why Washington's ser- 
vices, which he regarded as purely military, should be 
deemed greater than his own. He was, therefore, 
deeply chagrined and disappointed when the result of 
the election proved to be the unanimous choice of 
Washington for the first place and the far less unani- 
mous choice of himself for the second. 

"Nevertheless, during Washington's administration, 
John Adams worked usually in harmony with him, 
especially after that division of parties began which 
was destined to lead to the embodiment of Jefferson's 
ideas and principles in the institutions of the country. 
To those ideas and principles John Adams was reso- 
lutely opposed. He believed firmly in the necessity 



3obn Hoams 61 

of a ruling class. He conscientiously doubted the pos- 
sibility of stable government under a system of uni- 
versal suffrage, that provided for the equal participation 
of all the people in governmental affairs. Even in his 
writings he offended the sentiment of the times by 
speaking of the " well-born," thus assuming that very 
prerogative of birth against which the innermost souls 
of the great majority of the people were in active re- 
volt and protest. He profoundly distrusted the masses 
of the people. He did not believe, with Jefferson, 
that ordinary men could be safely trusted with the 
business of governing themselves. Though himself 
less conspicuously well-born than was Jefferson, with 
his Randolph mother, Adams nevertheless advocated 
privilege, or something like it, in strenuous opposition 
to Jefferson's doctrine of equality of right and of the 
capacity of the people to rule themselves wisely and 
well. In his " Discourses on Davila " he argued, with 
all the strength of a powerful mind and all the ingenu- 
ity of a practised debater, that pure democracy was 
an impracticable and undesirable form of government, 
and that a certain admixture of monarchy and aristoc- 
racy was essential to the permanence of governmental 
institutions. 

Nevertheless, in 17Q6, in spite of the strenuous and 
wily opposition of Hamilton and Jay, Adams was 
elected to succeed Washington as President. It is sig- 
nificant of the growing popular discontent with his 
doctrines that he alone, of the first five presidents, was 
denied a second term. During the first thirty-six 



62 Z\k fIDcn of tbc devolution 

years of the Republic, every chief magistrate, except 
John Adams, was rewarded for good service during 
his first term by election for a second. 

Adams's administration was perplexed in many 
ways, and in many ways turbulent. He had Jefferson 
for his Vice-President, but he ignored him as a factor 
in the administration. On the other hand, instead of 
commanding the strong support of Alexander Hamil- 
ton, who was by all odds the foremost lender of the 
Federalists, Adams managed to get into a violent con- 
troversy with that great leader, and thus in the end 
to disrupt the Federalist party, to which both belonged. 

The new outbreak of hostility between Fiance and 
England added enormously to the perplexities of 
Adams's administration. To an extent scarcely con- 
ceivable in our time, foreign affairs, scarcely at all 
connected in any vital way with our own national 
interests, influenced and dominated our national po- 
litical feeling at that time. The Republicans, repre- 
sented by Jefferson, strenuously favored France in her 
contest with Great Britain ; first, because France had 
now come to represent that liberty, self-government, 
and popular sovereignty for which America had so 
long and so painfully struggled against the British 
power, and, secondly, because the War of the Revolu- 
tion had left upon the popular mind an affectionate 
remembrance of the help rendered by France in our 
own struggle, and a popular detestation of everything 
that bore the name or stamp of the British Govern- 
ment. There were more or less important questions 



3obn Hoame 63 

at issue between the two parties, with reference to 
our own domestic policy. There was also grave dis- 
content on the part of the people with those stately 
aristocratic and monarchical forms and ceremonies 
which Washington had instituted in the government, 
and which John Adams, with his abiding belief in the 
necessity of such things, had rather emphasized than 
abated. But none of these questions of grave do- 
mestic import counted for one half as much in the 
politics of that time as did the question of the Federal- 
ist leaning toward Great Britain, on the one hand, 
and the Republican enthusiasm for France in her battle 
for liberty, on the other. 

Thus was John Adams's administration handi- 
capped from the beginning. The country was grow- 
ing more and more republican, more and more into 
sympathy with Jefferson's opinions and with the 
principles which he had embodied in its great charter 
of liberty, the Declaration of Independence. John 
Adams, now over seventy years of age, was too old 
and too far fixed in his own opinions to share in this 
growth of democracy. On the contrary, he seems 
increasingly to have shrunk from and dreaded it as 
a danger to the Republic that he loved so well. 

Added to this was the necessity for practical legisla- 
tion concerning the foreign affairs in controversy. It 
would have been almost a miracle if even his sagacity 
had been sufficient to steer his administration safely 
through such shoals and breakers. It is easy now for 
us to understand and realize that all the acts and 



64 £be fIDen of tbc "Revolution 

policies of his administration, whether wise or unwise, 
were sincerely directed by him to what he believed 
to be the safety and the ultimate welfare of the 
country. It is also easy for us to see now that in 
many ways his policy, in fact, served that high purpose. 
It saved us, for the time at least, from a war with 
Great Britain, in which we should have stood a tar 
smaller chance of successful issue than we did when 
that inevitable conflict ultimately occurred in 1S12. 
His policy at least secured a postponement of the 
contest until such time as the country should be 
readier and abler than it then was to conduct the 
struggle to success. 

But the result of Adams's administration was to 
discredit him, for the time at least, and to make an 
end of his career by the overthrow of his party and 
its practical extinction as a controlling influence in the 
government of the country for all time to come. In 
1800 he was defeated by Jefferson in his candidacy for 
re-election, and with his retirement from the presi- 
dential office his public career practically came to an 
end. But before he quitted office he gave to the 
country John Marshall as Chief Justice of the United 
States — an appointment which perhaps did more than 
any other that any President has ever made to estab- 
lish the Republic upon the firm foundations of clearly 
interpreted law and to make its greatness lasting. 

But upon his retirement from office, John Adams 
vented his rage at his own failure of re-election in a 
puerile way, singularly unworthy of a character that 



3obn Hfcams 65 

had so many times shown itself to be capable of 
exalted greatness. Instead of welcoming his suc- 
cessor, as has always since been the custom of out- 
going Presidents, and thus gracefully bowing to the 
decision of the people at the polls, John Adams left 
the Capital before daybreak on the 4th of March, 1801, 
and in a fit of pique left Jefferson to get himself in- 
ducted into office as best he might. This and some 
other instances, cited in his biographies, reveal on his 
part a vanity, a personal conceit, and a pettiness of 
mind wholly unworthy of the character of the man 
as exemplified in his great public services. But in 
view of those great public services his countrymen 
have always been disposed to overlook these little- 
nesses and to estimate him rather by the greatnesses 
of his mind and character. 

It is to the credit of the broader side of his mind 
that, in spite of his long antagonism to Jefferson, he 
resumed his friendship with that statesman in his later 
life, and cherished to his dying hour a high regard for 
the services of his great contemporary to the Republic 
and to the cause of liberty. Adams was nearly ninety- 
one years of age when he died, on the 4th of July. 
1820— the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the 
Declaration of Independence. Jefferson died on the 
same day, but Adams, unaware of that fact, congratu- 
lated himself, the country, and mankind upon the 
thought, expressed in his last words, "Thomas Jef- 
ferson still survives." 



THOMAS JEFFERSON 

THE dominant characteristic of Thomas Jefferson's 
mind and life was his unfaltering love of 
human liberty. He not only believed in free- 
dom as the inborn right of every human being, but he 
believed also and equally in the entire practicability 
and safety of permitting and authorizing personal free- 
dom as the actual and rightful possession of the indi- 
vidual. He believed that every human being born 
into this world has a God-given right to do as he 
pleases, so long as in doing so he does not interfere 
with the equal right of any other human being to do as 
he pleases. And, further, he believed that it is entirely 
safe to apply this rule in practice to all human life and 
conduct. 

How much this meant in Thomas Jefferson's time, 
we in our more liberal day are apt to underestimate. 
To us, the doctrines which once put him into the 
category of anarchists, — in which even Mr. Bryce has 
classed him, — and led to his inclusion in a Bill of 
Attainder, are commonplaces of thought. In his day 
indulgence in thought of that kind made the thinker 



Thomas Jefferson 

ill.ert Stusir 




w^ 



Gbomas 3ef£erson 67 

anathema maranatha, not only to the constituted 

powers that were, but often to the friends and inti- 
mates of the thinker as well. But Jefferson so strongly, 
so earnestly, so intensely, believed those doctrines of 
human right and human liberty that he not only 
declared them, but wrought them into the very web 
and woof of his life, and did all that was possible to 
him to embody them in the institutions and in the 
statute laws of his country. 

When he wrote the Declaration of Independence he 
literally believed every word that he put into that 
document. He believed "that all men are created 
equal ; that they are endowed by their Creator with 
certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and to that 
gospel of human freedom and human equality he was 
grandly and resolutely true to the end of his life. 

It is urged, in opposition to this view, that he was a 
slaveholder. That is true. Nevertheless, Thomas 
Jefferson hated slavery and feared it, and did all that 
was possible to him to secure its extinction. In the 
first draft that he made of the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence — that draft which most fully expressed his own 
unfettered thought — he included as a count in his 
tremendous indictment of King George the charge that 
his Majesty hail permitted, authorized, and encouraged 
the infamy of the slave trade. This count came hot 
from Jefferson's indignant heart. All the passion (hat 
was possible to his well-poised nature was wreaked 
upon it. It is missed to-day from the Declaration, 



6S Zbc flDcii of tbe "Revolution 

simply because Congress struck it out in opposition to 
his will, and Jefferson's biographers inform us that the 
reason for its striking out was the interest that New 
England had, through its ship-owners and ship- 
masters, in that horrible traffic in human beings which 
made chattels of their persons and merchandise of their 
muscles. 

In like manner, when Virginia ceded the Northwest 
Territory to the United States, Jefferson earnestly 
busied himself to write into the act of cession— drawn 
by himself — a stipulation forever binding the govern- 
ment to prohibit the existence of slavery in all that 
fair land which Virginia so generously gave to the 
nation. 

The first public speech that Jefferson ever made in 
the Legislature of Virginia was made in advocacy 
of the bill of Mr. Bland, designed to facilitate the 
emancipation of negro slaves. The law of the State 
at that time forbade any owner of a negro slave to 
manumit him without sending him beyond the borders 
of the State. Mr. Bland's bill proposed to make eman- 
cipation easier by repealing that provision of the 
statute, and Jefferson, a young man just beginning his 
political career, boldly ventured to advocate the reform 
as a means of getting rid of the curse of slavery. He 
did this in face of the fact that the author of the bill 
was openly denounced in the Legislature, on the rostrum, 
and in the public prints as an enemy of order, an 
opponent of law, and an assailer of sacred vested 
interests. 



Gbomas 3cffcrson 6 9 

Further than this, Jefferson later, but while still a 
young man, busied himself in still more important ways 
in behalf of the'liberty that he so devotedly loved. He 
was a member of the Virginia Legislature after inde- 
pendence was declared ; and at that time what Virginia 
did the other States were apt to do in reverent imita- 
tion. Jefferson brought forward in that dominant 
Legislature and strenuously advocated three measures 
which were then accounted anarchistic and dangerously 
subversive of established institutions. He advocated 
them solely upon that ground of natural human equality 
which he had already so superbly set forth in the 
Declaration of Independence. 

One of these measures abolished the iniquity of en- 
tails, thus making all property liable, as it ought to be, 
for all debts, and thus removing a fruitful source of 
inequality and injustice from the statute law. The 
second abolished the absurd iniquity of primogeniture 
and with it the degrading dependence of younger chil- 
dren upon the will of eldest sons. The purpose of this 
measure was to secure among the children of an estate- 
owner that equality of opportunity and right which 
Jefferson believed to be God's own gift to all human 
beings. It was the custom at that time not only to give 
the entire estate to the first-born son, but to give him 
also educational advantages that were wholly denied 
to all the younger sons, and to all the daughters either 
older or younger, of the family. This oldest son might 
be a blockhead, while some younger brother might be 
a man of genius. The older son might be inclined to 



-o Gbc flDcn of tbe "Revolution 

dissoluteness, while his younger brother might be a 
youth o\ probity and good habits. Regardless of all 
this, the eldest son was sent abroad to be educated at 
Oxford or Cambridge and to make the grand tour of 
the continent in company with a tutor, while the 
younger was left with no other education than that 
which he might pick up in an " old held school." And 
the younger brother was left also for life a helpless 
dependent upon his senior. He was not expected or 
even allowed to do anything in particular if the estate 
could afford to support him in idleness, and if he could 
manage to be sufficiently subservient to retain the 
favor of my lord, his brother. It was a vicious system, 
embodying in itself all that is worst in aristocracy, all 
that is most destructive in the system of class privilege. 

Jefferson sought with all his soul to abolish this 
hideous wrong, and perhaps no other service that he 
rendered to the country during his long and busy life 
was more lastingly important than this. 

The third of Jefferson's great measures was a statute 
providing for religious liberty, which then did not exist 
in Virginia or, in any true sense, in any of the other colo- 
nies. This measure absolutely abolished the connection 
between church and state, and firmly established that 
perfect freedom of conscience upon which we boast 
ourselves. Prior to that time, liberty ot conscience had 
mainly meant the liberty of the dominant church in 
each colony to impose itself and its will upon dis- 
senters and unbelievers, without fear of restraint from 
any other ecclesiastical authority. This was true in 



ftbomas 3cffcrson 71 

New England, as the life of Roger Williams and the 
history of the Quakers testify. It was true in Pennsyl- 
vania, where the Quakers, while themselves claiming a 
liberty not enjoyed elsewhere, were distinctly intoler- 
ant of that which did not agree with their order. It 
was true in Maryland, where the Catholics boasted 
themselves of their liberality in granting Protestants 
the right to live, and not much else. In brief, the con- 
ception of religious liberty which Jefferson embodied in 
this statute was utterly absent from the laws, the insti- 
tutions, and the very fundamental ideas of every colony, 
just as it was from the laws, institutions, and ideas of 
every European nation. 

It is not too much to say that by his introduction, 
advocacy, and successful passage of this statute in Vir- 
ginia, Thomas Jefferson, for the first time in history, 
made religious liberty a fact. He was unquestionably 
right in selecting this as one of the three great achieve- 
ments of his life worthy to be recorded on his tomb- 
stone, where he directed that the legend should be 
inscribed : " Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author 
of the Declaration of American Independence, of the 
statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and father of 
the University of Virginia." 

In support of this measure of religious freedom, 
Jefferson uttered some eternal truths which in our time 
seem commonplaces, but which then were regarded as 
revolutionary in the extreme. He said: " Government 
has nothing to do with opinion." " Compulsion makes 
hypocrites, not converts." "It is error alone which 



72 Gbc fIDcn of tbc Revolution 

needs the support of government : Truth can stand by 
itself." These statements seem truisms to the modern 
American mind, but in Jefferson's day they seemed 
startling and even shocking in their radicalism. Byron 
says that "Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away." 
It may with equal truth be said that Thomas Jefferson 
legislated religious intolerance out of this country. He 
could not banish bigotry from our free land, but at any 
rate he cut its hideous claws. 

His advocacy of each of these three measures was a 
direct slap in the face to the spirit of his time and to 
the social order to which he belonged. For, while Jef- 
ferson through his father was descended from the 
yeomanry, he inherited through his mother the bluest 
blood and the most aristocratic lineage then existing 
on the American continent. His three measures were 
calculated and deliberately intended to destroy the 
very institutions on which that aristocracy of which 
he was a part rested as its foundation. And his zeal 
in their advocacy was an affront to his own people 
and a challenge to the institutions that gave him place 
and prominence. His advocacy of them was not less 
than heroism on the part of a man born to aristocracy 
on one side of his house and on the other to a plebe- 
ianism that needed bolstering. 

His advocacy of these three measures is cited here 
not as the only illustration of his devotion to human 
liberty and equality, but merely as furnishing the 
three most conspicuous examples of it. That senti- 
ment dominated his entire life and inspired all of his 



Gbomas 3cffcrecm 73 

public nets. It was he who originated the statute for 
the establishment of local courts of justice throughout 
the commonwealth, in order that equity and the pro- 
tection of the law might be available equally to the 
poor and the rich — an idea wholly foreign to the co- 
lonial Virginian mind. 

It was he who alone and laboriously struggled for 
the establishment of a system of common schools 
throughout the State. It was he who tried for years 
to introduce into Virginia the New England system of 
town government, upon the avowed ground that, as 
a matter of observation, that system secured liberty 
and exact right among men, and thus ministered at the 
altar of that god of his idolatry, human equality. 

We have here the keynote to Jefferson's character. 
His love of human freedom, his belief in its entire 
practicability, and his firm conviction of the natural 
equality of men were things fundamental to his nature 
and dominant in his life. In support of these beliefs — 
which were then accounted dangerously anarchis- 
tic — he never faltered, never wavered, never for one 
moment permitted himself to doubt the righteousness 
of his principles. 

It has been stupidly suggested by writers inatten- 
tive to dates and facts that Jefferson imbibed his creed 
from the vagaries of the French Revolution. It is only 
necessary, by way of reply, to remind the reader that 
the French Revolution occurred many years after Jef- 
ferson had written his creed not only into statutory 
law but into a public document— the Declaration of 



74 £bc flDcn of tbc "Revolution 

Independence — which will live to inspire men so long 
as time endures. He wrote that greatest charter of 
liberty in 1770. The French Revolution did not begin 
until 1789. Without doubt or question, the French 
revolutionists borrowed much from Jefferson's teach- 
ings, but to suggest that Jefferson learned his lessons 
of liberty from acts or utterances of theirs, is to sup- 
pose that the year 1789 antedated the year 1770. 

Jefferson was, in fact, scarcely more than a boy 
when he began that splendid career in the Virginia 
Legislature which has been already adverted to, and 
which in that Legislature, in Congress, as Secretary of 
State, and as President of these United States, contin- 
ued for nearly half a century, as an apostleship of 
human liberty. 

Another characteristic which Jefferson shared with 
Washington, Franklin, and Adams, and with the other 
great men of that heroic time, was his self-sacrificing 
devotion to the public welfare. As Franklin spent his 
own money to provide the means of public defence, 
and turned into the treasury of his country at the time 
of its sorest need every dollar of his private fortune 
that he could in any wise convert into money, and 
as Washington served seven years in war and eight 
years in peace, refusing not only the pay assigned by 
Congress as a compensation for his services, but also 
those richer emoluments which were afterwards 
pressed upon him by a grateful country, so Jefferson 
actually impoverished himself, sinking from opulence 
to indigence, in the public service. When he first 



Gbomas 3cffcrson 75 

entered upon his legislative duties in Virginia, he 
wrote it down as a resolution, "Never to engage, 
while in public office, in any kind of enterprise for the 
improvement of my own fortune, nor to wear any 
other character than that of a farmer." How as- 
tonishing would be a suggestion of such a doctrine 
to certain of the public men of our time ! How con- 
temptuously they would reject it as the absurdest 
quixotism ! Yet Jefferson resolutely adhered to it 
throughout all the years of his protracted public ser- 
vice, loyal to it upon principle, and, as has been said, 
at cost of financial ruin to himself. When he entered 
Washington's Cabinet he was an opulent man, pos- 
sessed of vast estates, the improvement of which 
would have been the first care of a man less devoted 
than he to the public weal. When he retired from 
the presidency, twenty years later, he was so far im- 
poverished by neglect of his own affairs in his care for 
the interests of the nation, that he seriously feared 
arrest for debt before his departure from the capital. 
Only a timely loan from a Richmond bank enabled him 
to leave Washington without that humiliation, and to 
retire to his estate in the hope of so managing his 
affairs as to pay his debts and retain something for the 
support of his declining years. No grander spectacle 
of heroic devotion to the public service has ever been 
presented in the career of any man, not excepting even 
that of George Washington himself. 

Before Jefferson died, he had had to sell his library, 
and part with much else that was precious to him, in 



76 Sbe flDcn of tbc "Revolution 

order to meet the obligations incurred while he was 
attending- to the public's affairs to the neglect of his 
own. When he died, the whole of his estate was 
sold for barely enough money to discharge his debts. 
His daughter and her children were left without the 
means of support, and would have fallen into want but 
for the spontaneous generosity of Virginia and South 
Carolina, whose Legislatures each voted to his daugh- 
ter a free gift of $10,000. 

Unlike Washington and Franklin, Jefferson had the 
advantage of an orderly education. He was trained ;it 
William and Mary College, which then gave to its 
students, as Harvard did to the young men of New 
England, about that amount of instruction which our 
boys in the present day receive in a good High School, 
or somewhat less than that. His instruction in law, 
though irregular in its ordering, was of a much higher 
character. It had for its basis Coke upon Lyttleton, 
and it included four years of diligent reading and 
practical experience in the office of a learned coun- 
sellor. It was a training in the law of that high qual- 
ity which made possible such jurists as John Marshall 
and John Jay, and the other legal giants of that strenu- 
ous time. It was such training in the law as few 
students receive in our day, when Practice is given 
precedence over Principle; when ancient traditions and 
broad historical truths are made to give place to a 
study of codes and statutory technicalities, and when 
the coming lawyer is taught rather how to win cases 
in court than to understand the theory, the principle, 



Gbomas 3effcrecm 77 

the history, and, above all, the eternal righteousness of 
the law. 

It was in thus learning the law that Thomas Jef- 
ferson imbibed those convictions of human right, hu- 
man liberty, and human equality which dominated his 
mind throughout his career. He knew more of Eng- 
lish constitutional law than the King and all his minis- 
ters ever dreamed of, and upon occasion he sorely 
confounded them with his learning. In previously- 
learning the mathematics, to which he was a devotee, 
and in which he was an expert, he had acquired that un- 
compromising devotion to exact truth which prompted 
him throughout life to apply the principles he had 
learned in his study of the law to present conditions as 
relentlessly as if they had been mathematical formula;. 

And in thus learning the law Jefferson acquired 
that intellectual training which leads to precision of 
statement, lucidity of comprehension, and simple di- 
rectness of utterance. Literary style in that period 
was supposed to be formed by "giving one's days 
and nights to Addison"; but it is observable in the 
writings of such men as John Jay, John Marshall, John 
Adams, and the rest of the great lawyers, that they 
had learned from their law studies a literary art finer 
than any of which Addison was a master. They had 
learned to think clearly and to express their thoughts 
with a precision and lucidity that Addison scarcely 
dreamed of. 

Jefferson has been called "the pen of the Revolu- 
tion." Certainly no man in that time wrote with 



78 Zbc flDcii of tbc "Revolution 

greater ease and elegance than he, and, still more cer- 
tainly, none wrote with a more convincing simplicity. 
It is doubtful that there is in the language anywhere a 
nobler specimen of convincing literary style than the 
Declaration of Independence, and it was Jefferson's habit 
throughout life to write in that clear-cut, masterly way. 

From his father, Peter Jefferson, Thomas inherited 
a stalwart frame and a mind simple in its conscien- 
tiousness. From this father, also, he received up to 
the age of fourteen an invaluable tuition in the robust 
exercises of the chase. He learned to shoot, to ride, 
to swim, and, better still, to dare; and this father — 
planter, surveyor, and man of exalted character — left 
behind him instructions for the education of his son, 
both physically and mentally, which, without doubt, 
had large influence in moulding him for that high ser- 
vice that he was destined later to render to his coun- 
try and to mankind. From his mother, Jane Randolph, 
Thomas Jefferson inherited the highest traditions of 
loyalty to duty then prevalent in a community where 
traditions were binding, especially when they involved 
the point of honor. 

This was the making of the man, and this explains 
him. According to the custom of his time and family, 
he entered at twenty-one years of age upon unpaid 
public service as a justice of the peace and a vestry- 
man of his parish. In the meantime, he had assumed 
charge of his dead father's estate and was managing 
its difficult affairs with skill and discretion, while carry- 
ing on an earnest study of the law. At the age of 



Gbomas 3cfferson 79 

twenty-four, he was admitted to the bar and entered 
at once upon an active practice. He was no speaker, 
and in that day, in Virginia, oratory was accounted the 
most essential equipment of the young lawyer. But 
his knowledge was so profound, his judgment so dis- 
creet, and his industry so untiring, that his lack of 
oratorical ability counted scarcely at all against him 
in the reckoning. 

He was twenty-six years of age when, in May, 1769, 
he took his seat as a member of the Virginia House of 
Burgesses, of which Washington also was a member. 
It was a stormy time of conflict with the royal gov- 
ernor, Lord Botetourt, who three days later dissolved 
the House for what he regarded as its treasonable 
course in contending for the right of the colonies to 
exemption from all taxation not levied by their own 
representatives. From that time till 1774, Thomas 
Jefferson was one of the most active, intelligent, and 
uncompromising opponents in the Virginia Legislature 
of every assertion of royal authority. It was he who 
prepared that " Draught of Instructions" which Virginia 
gave to her delegates in Congress, and which formed 
the basis and inspiration of the movement in behalf 
of independence throughout all the colonies. Here 
Thomas Jefferson's extraordinary grasp of the princi- 
ples of English law and of human right, and his 
singular capacity for the lucid and convincing utter- 
ance of truth, rendered possible his first great contri- 
bution to the cause of American independence. He 
proposed an address to the King ; but he proposed 



so £bc fiDcn of tbc "Revolution 

also that this address should be not servile or too 
submissive, but manly and courteously self-assertive. 
He proposed that the address should frankly remind 
the King that he was, after all, nothing more than the 
chosen chief executive of a great people, and that he 
was possessed only of definite and limited powers. 
He insisted that the Legislature of Virginia had as clear 
a right to pass laws for the government of England 
as the Parliament of England had to pass laws for the 
government of Virginia. This was bold and radical 
ground to take, and there is little wonder that it 
brought Jefferson under condemnation as a pestilent 
revolutionist ; but even this was not all. Intimately 
familiar as he was with the history as well as with the 
law of England, he actually ventured to refer approv- 
ingly to "the late deposition of His Majesty King 
Charles by the Commonwealth of England.'" 

Is it any wonder that two years later, when Con- 
gress at last accepted the idea of independence, this 
young apostle of human right and of American liberty 
was chosen chairman of the committee charged with 
the duty of drawing up that declaration of causes and 
reasons which was felt to be due to "a decent respect 
for the opinions of mankind " ? The veteran Benjamin 
Franklin — everywhere recognized as the most effective 
writer, and the most experienced diplomatist in all the 
colonies — was a member of that committee. John 
Adams, representing the best thought, the highest 
learning, and the fundamental character of the already 
revolted and warring New England States, was an- 



Ebomas 3effcrson 81 

other. Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston- 
giants in their way— completed the list of the com- 
mittee. But, among these notables and veterans, it 
was Thomas Jefferson, a young man only thirty-three 
years of age, who was made chairman of the com- 
mittee and charged with the exalted duty of writing 
the greatest State paper and the grandest setting forth 
of the essentials of human right that has a place any- 
where in the archives of the nations of earth. It was 
eminently fit, and it was felt to be so, that the man 
who had drawn the Virginia Instructions should write 
the Declaration of Independence, of which they were 
the foundation. This young man had boldly ventured 
to ask, " Can any one reason be assigned why 160,000 
electors in the Island of Great Britain should give 
law to 4,000,000 in the States of America ? " In that 
question, boldly propounded to the King and Parlia- 
ment of Great Britain, Jefferson had put the essentials 
of the American thought and contention. It was 
specially fit, when the time came to declare indepen- 
dence as a measure of revolt against injustice and 
usurpation, that this young man, who so clearly under- 
stood the subject and so vigorously grasped the ideas 
fundamental to it, should be employed to set forth to 
all mankind the reasons that impelled the colonies to 
declare themselves, of right, free and independent 
States. He had already by his utterances brought 
upon himself, as he himself phrased it, " the honor of 
having his name inserted in a long list of proscriptions, 
enrolled in a Bill of Attainder." 



.82 Gfoc flfccn of tbc "Revolution 

Having accomplished the work assigned him, 
Thomas Jefferson resigned his seat in Congress and 
returned to his duties as a member of the Virginia 
Legislature. It was then that he sought to introduce 
the New England system of local self-government into 
his native State. It was then that he began his suc- 
cessful warfare upon entails, primogeniture, and the 
relation between church and state to which reference 
has already been made in this essay. As he himself 
expressed it, in a letter to Dr. Franklin, his efforts were 
directed to the end that Virginia— then the dominant 
State in the Union— should lay aside "the monarchi- 
cal, and take up the republican government," and, 
as he said, Virginia did this "with as much ease as 
would have attended the throwing off an old and 
putting on a new suit of clothes." 

If Jefferson's work had ended here, it would have 
been enough to justify the granting of a place to him in 
any Hall of Fame in which the demigods of American 
history are entitled to the celebration of their virtues 
and their services. Three times Congress called upon 
him to go abroad in the delicate and difficult diplomatic 
service of that time. Three times he declined, not 
for personal reasons, but in each case because the 
occasion for sending him abroad seemed to have 
passed away before the time for his departure arrived. 
But, meantime, other public services continuously occu- 
pied his mind and his energies to the serious detriment 
of his private fortunes. In 1770, in the storm-and- 
stress period of the Revolution, he was made Governor 



Gbomas 3cffcrson S3 

of Virginia, and for two years lie occupied that difficult 
position, and discharged its arduous and perplexing 
duties so efficiently that when, later, in answer to cer- 
tain carping criticisms, he demanded a searching inves- 
tigation of his administration, the Legislature of Virginia, 
without a dissenting voice, passed a resolution thank- 
ing him by public authority, and in behalf of the people, 
for his " impartial, upright and attentive discharge of 
duty." 

In 17S2, he was again unanimously chosen as the 
country's plenipotentiary to France, to treat for peace. 
He accepted the appointment, but did not sail because 
news came that a preliminary treaty had already been 
signed. In 1783, he was again elected to Congress, 
and, as chairman of the committee on the currency, he 
gave to us that decimal monetary system which has so 
greatly ministered to the prosperity of the country. 
Unfortunately, his effort to apply this decimal system 
to all weights and measures was not successful, and 
consequently to this day our boys and girls must 
stupefy their brains in muddling over a lot of "tables" 
which are without congruity, without reason for 
being, and without sense. Some day, perhaps, we 
shall be civilized enough and wise enough to carry 
out Thomas Jefferson's idea and apply to all measures 
that decimal system which he, even in that early day, 
applied in his odometer to the measuring of all roads 
over which he travelled. 

In 1784, Congress still again appointed Jefferson 
Minister Plenipotentiary to France, and on the sth of 



84 Zbc nDcn of tbe "Revolution 

July of that year he went abroad upon that mission. 
"You replace Dr. Franklin," said the Count de Ver- 
gennes to him, when he presented his credentials, in 
1785. "I succeed Dr. Franklin," answered Jefferson ; 
"nobody can replace him." 

During his stay in France, Jefferson's intense repub- 
licanism was enormously recruited by his study of the 
horrible conditions into which arbitrary and insanely 
mediaeval government, and the abuses of aristocratic 
privilege, had brought the plain people. He was 
shocked and horrified by what he saw— so shocked 
and horrified that the very excesses of the French 
Revolution, which soon afterward broke out, always 
seemed to him less horrible than the evils against which 
they were a protest. In a letter to Madison, he wrote 
that the government then existing in France was a 
"government of wolves over sheep, or kites over 
pigeons." He went among the people, ate of their 
scanty meals, rested himself upon their beds, as he 
said, "to see if they were soft," and found them very 
hard. 

After five years, passed alternately in the glittering 
pageants of the court and in the hovels of the peas- 
antry, he returned to America a more intensely deter- 
mined Democrat even than he had been before his 
mission began. All that he had wrought out of prin- 
ciple and theory by his philosophy he found there 
demonstrated by fact. All of antagonism to tyranny, 
which his studies of the law and his thinking upon 
lines of common sense had implanted in his soul, was 



Gbomas 3cffcrson 85 

thus strengthened by example, and intensified by prac- 
tical illustration of the misery to which the luxury of 
the aristocrat condemns the children of the people. He 
had seen both sides. He had enjoyed the glories of 
the French court, and had lain upon the couches and 
eaten the meagre porridge of the people. He had seen 
privilege at its best and privation at its worst. He 
came back to America more deeply convinced than ever 
of those self-evident truths which he had long ago 
written into the Declaration of Independence — "that all 
men are created equal ; that they are endowed by their 
Creator with certain unalienable rights ; that among 
these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." 

On his return to Virginia, in 1789, after five years 
of arduous service in France, he was instantly called 
again to public duty. Washington, then President, 
asked him to assume the functions of Secretary of 
State. He accepted the appointment very reluctantly. 
The duties of the place were delicate and difficult in 
the extreme. The salary attached to it was not more 
than half sufficient to pay for the diplomatic dinners 
that the Secretary must give and the other expenses 
that he must incur in the discharge of his duties to the 
government. Moreover, Washington had been elected 
as the candidate of no party, or rather of all parties. 
As a result, he had called about him for his Cabinet 
men of exceedingly diverse views, whose opinions 
there was no hope of reconciling. Oil and water are 
not more difficult of fusion than were the opinions of 
Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State, and Alexander 



86 Elnc fiDcn of tbe devolution 

Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury. Jefferson be- 
lieved absolutely in democratic government — a gov- 
ernment such as Lincoln many years later characterized 
as "government of the people, by the people, for the 
people. " Hamilton believed in government of the peo- 
ple, by authority, for the general good — the general 
good including especially the good of the ruling class. 
There is much dispute as to whether Hamilton really 
desired and proposed the establishment of monarchy 
in this country, with an aristocracy as its buttress, but 
whether he did or not, it is certain that his ideas did 
not at all follow those lines upon which the ideas of 
Jefferson were formed ; it is certain that he had less 
faith in the capacity of the people for self-government 
than Jefferson had ; it is certain that he believed in more 
government and stronger government than Jefferson's 
mind was ready to tolerate. 

Knox, another member of the Cabinet, was in all 
these respects the disciple of Hamilton, and thus Jef- 
ferson, though at the head of the Cabinet, found him- 
himself in continuous antagonism with the ideas and 
opinions of those others who were associated with 
him in that formative period, which was destined to 
give color and direction to our national institutions. 
Even Washington himself had a belief in state and 
ceremony which was peculiarly obnoxious to Jeffer- 
son's mind. He instituted ceremonies that were to 
Jefferson intensely offensive, as Jefferson himself de- 
monstrated by decreeing their utter and instant abolition 
when he became President in his turn. 



Gbomas 3efferson 87 

It is hard to imagine a more difficult position than 
that which Jefferson occupied, as the head of Wash- 
ington's Cabinet. He was personally so firm a be- 
liever in his doctrine of human liberty and of the right 
of the people to rule themselves that he eulogized 
Thomas Paine's " Rights of Man," declared that if the 
French Revolution " had desolated half of the earth " 
it would still have benefited mankind by its abolition 
of the abuses that gave rise to it, and said that 
" were there only an Adam and an Eve left in each 
country, and left free, it would be better than as it 
now is." The antagonism of Hamilton to such views 
as these was wholly irreconcilable, and even Wash- 
ington, with all his tact and charity, and dread of 
partisanship, was unable to reconcile this conflict of 
fundamental opinions. 

The situation became so strained at last that at 
the beginning of 1794 Jefferson forced his resignation 
upon the President and retired to Monticello, in the 
hope that, by attention to his estate, he might in some 
degree repair those ravages which the war and his 
long neglect of personal for public affairs had wrought 
in his fortunes. In common with Washington, Frank- 
lin, John Adams, and many others of the founders of 
the Republic Jefferson had grievously sacrificed his 
own fortunes to those of the nation. It was now his 
fond hope to retire permanently from public life and 
devote the remainder of his days, as Washington so 
often and so earnestly desired to do, to the peaceful 
and gratifying pursuit of agriculture. A few months 



ss Sbe flDcn of tbe "Revolution 

later, however, Washington invited Jefferson to re- 
sume his headship in the Cabinet, Hamilton having, in 
the meantime, retired. This invitation Jefferson de- 
clined, declaring that under no circumstances would 
he ever again enter upon public office. Yet two years 
later Jefferson was voted for as a candidate for the 
presidency and was actually chosen to be Vice-Presi- 
dent. Four years later still, he was a candidate for the 
presidency, and was elected to that high office, which 
he filled for eight years, being re-elected in 1804. 

Every intelligent student of Jefferson's career must 
realize that, indirectly but actually his greatest service 
to the Republic was educational— that in his legisla- 
tive and other labors for liberty, and in his long-con- 
tinued advocacy of the freedom of the individual as a 
natural, God-given right, and not as a gracious gift of 
government, he rendered a service wholly matchless 
in its splendor. 

But it was as President that in material ways he 
most conspicuously conferred benefit upon his coun- 
try. It was he who gave to this nation the right and 
privilege of becoming great. It was he who negotiated 
a purchase which not only gave to us the vast territory 
west of the Mississippi, but with it gave us also per- 
petual exemption from the possibility of a hostile 
power on our Western borders, and made the whole 
length of that most wonderful of all river systems for- 
ever our own. In the minds of those who look most 
at material things this will always stand as Jefferson's 
greatest service to the Republic. And certainly, in 



Gbomae 3efferson s 9 

material ways, there has been no greater service ren- 
dered by any man or any administration. 

But Jefferson impressed himself for good in other 
ways upon the government of the country, upon its 
institutions, and upon its habits of thought. Wash- 
ington, born and bred an aristocrat and for long years 
exercising arbitrary power and maintaining state as a 
great commander of armies, had brought into the gov- 
ernment a degree of pomp and ceremony which he 
deemed essential to the maintenance of that popular 
awe and respect which, up to that time, had been 
deemed essential to the preservation of governmental 
dignity. He had been accused, indeed, of introducing 
actually royal surroundings for himself. So grave 
had been this question in his mind that at one time he 
formally submitted it to the members of his Cabinet, 
and drew from them written opinions as to what 
measure of state and ceremony it was desirable and 
necessary for the President to maintain. To Jefferson, 
when he came into power, this was no question at all. 
He was a democrat of democrats. He believed in the 
equality of men as well as in their liberty. He re- 
garded the government as nothing more nor less than 
their agency for the transaction of the public business. 
He regarded himself, in his capacity as President, as 
nothing more than the citizen selected by his fellow 
citizens to care for their common concerns. He there- 
fore at once swept away all of Washington's forms 
and ceremonies, which John Adams, in spite of his own 
love of simplicity, had permitted to survive through 



90 Gbe riDcn of tbe 'Revolution 

his administration. Jefferson lived plainly, dressed 
plainly, and behaved as any plain gentleman might. 
He abolished the weekly levee, and in every other 
way possible stripped the presidential office of the 
millinery and flummery of state. 

It had been the custom of presidents to deliver 
annual addresses to Congress, after the manner of the 
English Speech from the Throne. Jefferson abolished 
this custom. Instead of an address, he sent to Con- 
gress a carefully prepared message, laying before that 
body the information, the suggestions, and the recom- 
mendations called for by the Constitution. He thus 
established a democratic practice which has endured to 
our own day, no president having ever thought (^f re- 
verting to the older and more monarchic way. 

As Vice-President under Mr. Adams, Jefferson had 
taken no part whatever in government, beyond the 
discharge of his duties as President of the Senate. 
For by this time the cleavage between parties was 
becoming marked, and Jefferson and Adams were an- 
tipodal to each other in their political opinions. Adams 
the Federalist felt no desire to consult with Jefferson 
the radical Republican. And Jefferson, in his turn, had 
no wish to share responsibility for the acts of an ad- 
ministration whose principles he regarded as wrong, 
and whose proceedings he considered hurtful and, in 
some part at least, unlawful. Two years before his 
own election to the presidency he had drawn the cele- 
brated Kentucky Resolutions of 1708. expressing, as 
they had never before been expressed, those doctrines 



Gbomas 3cffcrson 91 

upon which the Republican — afterwards called the 
Democratic — party made its appeal to the people. 
Those resolutions denounced the Alien and Sedition 
Laws not only as unconstitutional, but as subversive 
of fundamental human rights. Except in writing the 
Declaration of Independence, it is doubtful that Jeffer- 
son ever made a greater contribution to the science of 
free government than in the framing of those resolu- 
tions. Naturally, when he came to be President, he 
did all that he could to undo the mischiefs wrought by 
those laws. He pardoned every man who was im- 
prisoned under the terms of the Sedition Law, holding 
that law to be " a nullity as absolute and palpable as 
if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship 
a golden image." He sent friendly and sympathetic 
letters to the chief victims of the Alien Law, Kosci- 
uszko and Volney, and he invited Dr. Priestley, who 
had been menaced by that statute, to be his guest in the 
Executive Mansion. To Thomas Paine he offered the 
honor of a homeward voyage in a government war-ship. 
Jefferson was the first of our presidents to encounter 
those problems of the civil service which have so 
greatly vexed all of his successors. He found practi- 
cally every office, great and small, occupied by a 
Federalist, and he found, too, that the hunger and thirst 
for place with which we are now so familiar had already 
begun its clamor. The least that was demanded of 
him was that he should make enough removals and 
new appointments to establish an equality of office- 
holding between the two parties. This Jefferson 



92 <Ibc flDcn of tbc "Revolution 

resolutely refused to do. He held firmly to the doc- 
trine that a faithful subordinate, whose functions are 
not political, should never be displaced because of 
a difference between his political views and those 
of the administration. He made no removals except 
for official misconduct, or, in his own words, for 
"active and bitter opposition to the order of things 
which the public will has established "—that is to say, 
for disloyalty to our republican form of government. 

It is no part of the purpose of the present essay to 
recount in detail the acts and the events of Jefferson's 
administration. In historical importance, the Louisiana 
Purchase, already referred to, was chief among the 
external acts of his administration. It not only gave 
to us a territory which American enterprise has wrought 
into a matchless empire of populous and opulent States, 
but it made this country great by forever freeing us 
from the possibility of a rival nation in the country 
beyond the Mississippi. But to the thoughtful mind 
the greatest service of Jefferson's administration was its 
efficiency in republicanizing the Republic— in making 
this great democracy democratic— in teaching the 
people to trust themselves, and in demonstrating to 
all mankind the possibility of a free people establishing 
and maintaining a great and powerful nation without 
any of those adventitious aids which had from the 
beginning of time been accounted necessary to the 
creation and the maintenance of national power. 

When Jefferson entered upon the presidency there 
was everywhere doubt and distrust of republican 



Gbomas 3cffcrson 93 

forms and principles. It was everywhere doubted 
that a government strong enough to stand alone could 
be securely rested upon faith in the popular honesty 
and intelligence. It was everywhere doubted that 
national strength was compatible with actual indi- 
vidual liberty. It was everywhere doubted that the 
people could be trusted to manage their own affairs. 
When Jefferson quitted the presidency all these 
problems had been wrought out to a demonstration 
through his superb courage in fearlessly applying prin- 
ciples to practice. It is scarcely too much to say that 
Thomas Jefferson created the only great Republic this 
world has ever known, in which republicanism is real 
and self-government an actual fact. 

It has already been related that Jefferson griev- 
ously impoverished himself in his devotion to the 
public service, and that when he retired from the presi- 
dency he was actually apprehensive of detention in 
Washington under an arrest for debt— that hideous 
thing, imprisonment for debt, having not then been 
eliminated from American law. Jefferson had inherited 
from his father a fair patrimony of fertile lands, with 
about thirty slaves to till them. His wife had brought 
to him as her dowry 40,000 acres of land and one 
hundred and thirty-five slaves. Such an estate, under 
the careful and skilful management of such a man as 
Thomas Jefferson, would unquestionably have made 
him one of the most opulent men in America. That 
opportunity he sacrificed willingly to the public service, 
and his declining years were passed in poverty and 



94 <Ihc flDcn of tbc "Revolution 

financial embarrassment solely because of his sacrifice 
of his time, his genius, and his energies, to the service 
of his countrymen. 

His retirement from public life occurred at the age 
of sixty-six years, and his personal affairs strenuously 
demanded his utmost attention, yet he did not cease 
even then, and under such circumstances, to concern 
himself with the welfare of his country and especially 
of his native State. His correspondence with Madison 
and Monroe was mightily helpful to the nation in a 
time of sore stress and strait. He busied himself in 
a renewed effort to establish common schools in Vir- 
ginia like those that had done so much for New Eng- 
land. He was baffled in this, largely by reason of 
the fact that in Virginia the land was held in large 
plantations, and the population, therefore, was so 
widely scattered that the maintenance of schools for 
all was difficult, expensive, and in some cases impos- 
sible. Yet to this educational purpose Jefferson de- 
voted all his energy and all his abilities for years. 

In another educational project he was more suc- 
cessful. He made himself truly— as he desired that 
his tombstone should declare— " the father of the 
University of Virginia." He not only secured the 
financial appropriations necessary to the establishment 
and maintenance of that noble institution, but he 
planned its system of education and personally super- 
intended every detail of the construction of its build- 
ings. He founded it rigidly upon those principles of 
truth and justice which had dominated all his thoughts 



Gbomas 3etterson 95 

throughout his life. He forbade it to grant honorary 
degrees, holding it rigidly to the function of crowning 
actual scholarship and actual work with academic rec- 
ognition. He freed it, from the beginning, from all sem- 
blance of monarchism by providing that it should have 
no president, and he freed its students for all time from 
religious oppression by providing in its fundamental 
law that attendance on their part upon religious exer- 
cises of every kind should be purely voluntary. 

This, in brief, is the portrait of that apostle of 
liberty, without whose brave thought and aggressive 
energy much that this Republic means to mankind 
would have been lost. 




THE STATESMEN 



DANIEL WEBSTER 

NO man who has lived in this land of ours had 
richer gifts of genius than Daniel Webster. 
No man conspicuous for such gifts has had 
them marred to a greater degree by reason of his 
moral deficiency. 

As a lawyer, he was for thirty years and more the 
foremost man at the bar. In his grasp of great consti- 
tutional principles and of their bearing upon questions 
at issue in court or in the halls of legislation he had 
no superior, and perhaps no equal. Two men, only, 
in American history have surpassed him in this respect 
—namely, John Marshall and Joseph Story— and they 
were called so early to the bench as never to have 
been his competitors at the bar. As a statesman, dur- 
ing a still longer period he was unquestionably one of 
the greatest forces in America, both in legislative and 
in executive performance. As an orator of the larger 
kind, he was without a superior, without a rival, with- 
out a peer. After his Plymouth oration, John Adams, 
a very cool and self-possessed critic, not given in any 
degree to extravagances, went so far as to place him 

99 

L.oFC. 



ioo Gbe Statesmen 

above Burke, as "the most consummate orator of mod- 
ern times." His grasp of principles was instant and 
all-embracing. His diction was incisive in an extreme 
degree. He had an extraordinary gift of lucid, simple, 
and convincing statement, and joined with this a re- 
markable power of impassioned eloquence of that kind 
that gives to the orator a complete mastery over men. 
In aid of his oratory he had, too, a personal presence 
so impressive that it sometimes made even platitudes 
falling from his lips seem eloquent. 

His bearing was dignified and characterized by a 
solemnity which at times barely stopped short ol 
pomposity and affectation. 

But with all this splendid equipment — with every 
gift that Nature could lavish upon the orator and law- 
yer and statesman — with an unmatched power to com- 
pel, others to his way of thinking — Webster failed to 
achieve the highest greatness. He said himself a few 
months before his death : "1 have given my life to 
law and politics. Law is uncertain, and politics is 
utterly vain." It was the cry of a disappointed am- 
bition, the lamentation of conscious failure. The fail- 
ure was altogether due to those moral defects which 
were, from the beginning, the canker in the fair flower 
of his genius and his life. 

Webster had no moral convictions to which he 
adhered with any trustworthy persistency. It was not 
so much that he was immoral as that he was unmoral. 
He seems to have lacked any efficient sense of abiding 
moral obligation. He was strangely deficient in fixed 






Daniel Webster 

From an etching by I fohnson 



©anicl TOlcbstcr 101 

principle and in controlling conviction. Yet his per- 
ception of the value of such principles and convictions 
was so strong that he devoted much of his energy to 
the feigning of a virtue when he had it not. He posed 
throughout life as the foremost advocate and champion 
of a perpetual, indissoluble union, and without ques- 
tion did more than any other man in his time to im- 
press that thought and feeling on his countrymen. 
Yet in the early days of his congressional career, 
he bitterly and disloyally opposed the nation in its 
war with England, and used all his eloquence to de- 
feat measures designed to strengthen the hands of the 
government with men and means for the carrying on 
of that second war of independence. He went even 
farther than this. This champion and advocate of the 
union, of the constitution, of a strong, national gov- 
ernment was the author of the Rockingham Memorial, 
into which he wrote a scarcely veiled threat of New 
England's secession at a time of great national peril, 
when the perpetuity of the Union itself seemed im- 
mediately dependent upon universal and cordial sup- 
port of the administration at the hands of all citizens 
and all sections. 

Again, while professing the utmost breadth of na- 
tional feeling and sympathy, and boasting in his own 
phrase that "there are no Alleghanies in my politics," 
his speeches and votes in Congress, and his attitude 
upon all public questions were manifestly determined 
largely by purely sectional considerations. When Clay 
brought forward his protective tariff scheme Webster 



io2 £be Statesmen 

strongly opposed it, even to the point of contending, 
with much force and learning, that protection in any 
form is unconstitutional. In all this he spoke the 
voice of New England, which at that time was en- 
gaged almost exclusively in commerce by sea, and held 
radical free-trade doctrines. Later, when New Eng- 
land had become a manufacturing centre, and the in- 
terests of her mill-owners outweighed those of her 
merchant princes, Webster veered about and supported 
with all the power of his eloquence that extreme tariff 
bill which was justly called "the bill of abomina- 
tions." So, too, he began by opposing all banks and 
paper money, and ended as a foremost champion of 
the Second United States Bank when Jackson was 
making a war upon that institution. In brief, Webster 
clearly had no political convictions which he felt him- 
self bound to respect when his own interest or that 
of New England dictated a change. 

If this had been all, the excuses which have been 
put forward for his vacillating political course might 
perhaps be accepted. It might in that case have been 
enough of explanation to say that he was an oppor- 
tunist, changing his attitude from time to time in or- 
der at each moment to accomplish the best results that 
might then be attainable ; or to urge, as some of his 
biographers have done, that his changes were due to 
changes of public conditions ; — for example : that when 
he turned from radical free-trade to extreme protection 
he was simply accepting the policy of protection as 
one fixed by law, in spite of his endeavors to the 



Daniel THIlebstcr 103 

contrary, and seeking to make the most and the best 
of it. 

But, unhappily, Webster's moral deficiencies appear 
as clearly in his personal conduct as in his political career. 
In the Dartmouth College case, which first made him 
conspicuous as a constitutional lawyer, he accepted a 
fee from one side and afterwards appeared in behalf of 
the other. Lawyers have an ugly name for that spe- 
cies of conduct, which it is not necessary in an essay 
like this to employ. 

Again, throughout his wonderful career as a lawyer 
and statesman, Webster was greatly and continuously 
indebted to the counsel and assistance of Judge Story. 
At the time, he gratefully acknowledged this aid in 
many letters to Story, but after Story's death he most 
ungenerously refused to let the great Justice's son and 
biographer reprint either the letters in which Story 
had given him the counsel and assistance, or his own 
replies, acknowledging the service. It is not an ob- 
trusive or uncalled-for utterance to say that this was 
mean, small, and unworthy. 

Still more grievous was Webster's extraordinary 
lack of financial honesty. He earned an annual income 
of twenty thousand dollars during the first years of 
his law practice in Boston, and from that time forward 
his earnings were enormously increased by his cease- 
less employment in the Supreme Court. His income 
was greater, perhaps, than that of any other man of his 
time, and certainly very much greater than that of any 
other lawyer then living,— greater, far, than even an 



104 Gbc Statesmen 

extravagant man could need. Yet he was always and 
heavily in debt, always a ravenous borrower of other 
men's money, and, from beginning to end of his career 
he seemed never to concern himself with any effort to 
discharge his obligations or even to repay sums gen- 
erously loaned to him by men much poorer than himself, 
including the cab-drivers of Washington, whom he 
forced to accept his notes-of-hand in lieu of five-dollar 
bills. 

All his life he lived like a nabob on other men's 
money. All his life he lavishly squandered large sums 
that he did not own, and indulged every caprice of his 
own extravagant fancy, while his creditors were crip- 
pled for lack of the money he owed them. 

Finally, with all his ponderous dignity, he was not 
ashamed to accept outright a gift of money sent to him 
avowedly in recognition and reward of that seventh-of- 
March speech, in which he made himself the champion 
and most effective minister of the slave-power which 
he had all his life antagonized. 

Curiously enough, in face of all these extraordinary 
manifestations of dishonest selfishness, Mr. Webster's 
admirers, shutting their eyes to the undisputed facts, 
have been loud in their praises of his unselfishness and 
his generosity. They cite, in proof, the fact that he 
lavishly spent and gave away money ; but they omit 
to ask themselves whose money it was. 

Webster was born on the eighteenth of January, 
1782, in a little town in New Hampshire. He was the 
son of a poor, hardworking, and very meagrely educated 



XDanicl Webster 105 

farmer, a man of great integrity and fine intelligence. 
At a cost which he could ill afford, Ebenezer Webster 
gave Daniel, his brightest son, the best education he 
could command. The boy was graduated from Dart- 
mouth College in 1801, having distinguished himself 
there less by his devotion to study — which was not 
great— than by his eloquence, which even at that early 
age was conspicuous. He began at once to study law, 
but presently suspended that work in order to earn 
money for the education of his brother by teaching at 
Fryeburg, Maine. This was an impulse of unselfish- 
ness not often repeated in Webster's career. A little 
later he went to Boston and entered the law office 
of Mr. Gore, who secured his admission to the bar 
in 1805. Returning to New Hampshire, Webster 
opened a law office in the little town of Boscawen, 
where he speedily secured as good a practice in his 
profession as was possible in so small a place, and 
among a people so poor. On his father's death, about 
a year later, the family were found to be impoverished. 
Ebenezer Webster had sacrificed all his chances of 
accumulation, and had deeply mortgaged his little 
possessions in order to educate his sons. With that 
jaunty indifference to debt which characterized Webster 
throughout his life, the young man promptly assumed 
these, his father's debts. It is not recorded that he 
ever paid them ; or, if he did, that he ever repaid the 
money he borrowed for that purpose. From Boscawen 
Webster removed to Portsmouth, in search of a larger 
field, and there he quickly achieved all of practice and 



io6 Sbe Statesmen 

all of reputation that was then within the reach of 
a young lawyer in that not overpopulous or over- 
wealthy State. During the ten years of his residence 
in Portsmouth, Webster married and made his first 
entrance into politics. It was during that time that 
he wrote the Rockingham Memorial, already referred 
to, and was promptly elected to represent his district 
in Congress, with the session beginning in 1S13. He 
was at once made a member of the Committee on 
Foreign Relations, which, during that period of war, 
was by odds the most important committee in the 
House. He promptly renewed his antagonism to the 
administration, and to the war in which the country 
was engaged. His first act was to introduce and 
advocate resolutions designed to embarrass the ad- 
ministration, and to discredit the war, in which the 
national life itself was then in peril, as a war without 
due occasion. A little later he went farther than this, 
and spoke with great earnestness and eloquence against 
the bill designed to encourage enlistments. He shared 
passionately, and with a good deal of justice on his 
side, in the struggle then made against the restrictive 
measures which were crippling the commerce of the 
country. He opposed the war tax, denounced the war 
itself and its authors, and even went so far in the 
direction of disloyalty as to vote against the taxes 
necessary to carry on the struggle. Senator Lodge, 
in his biographical sketch, says : 

" There is a nice question of political ethics here, as to how 
far the opposition ought to go in time of national war and distress, 



Daniel Mcbstcr 107 

but it is certainly impossible to give more extreme expression to 
parliamentary opposition than to refuse supplies at the most 
critical moment in a severe conflict. To this last extreme of party 
opposition to the administration Mr. Webster went. It was as far 
as he could go, and remain loyal to the Union." 

Webster served for two terms in Congress, as a 
representative from New Hampshire. It was during 
that time that the United States Bank was chartered, 
against his opposition. He succeeded in compelling 
some radical and publicly beneficial modifications in 
the measure,— notably one which compelled the bank 
to redeem its notes in specie. But, even in this im- 
proved form, he voted against the bill to the last. 
Nevertheless, he afterwards, as already stated, became 
a champion and chief advocate of the bank, voting for 
the renewal of its charter and bitterly antagonizing 
Jackson's course with respect to the institution. 

At the end of his second term, on March 4, 1816, 
Webster retired to private life, and in the following 
June he removed from Portsmouth to Boston. There 
his law practice immediately became very great and 
remunerative. It was during this period of retirement 
from active political life that Webster became engaged 
in the celebrated Dartmouth College case. It was 
then that, after accepting a fee as pay for engaging in 
their case, he abandoned his clients for the service of 
their adversaries, — a course of which he never offered 
any explanation that could satisfy sensitively honor- 
able minds. The true explanation seems clearly to 
have been one of politics. The case took on a partisan 
complexion, and actually wrought a political revolution 



108 £bc Statesmen 

in the State. Webster was then, as previously, a 
strong partisan, one who usually accepted the policies 
and opinions of the Federalists without much of inde- 
pendent thought, and sustained them as an advocate 
maintains the contentions of his employing client. It 
happened that Webster's party took that side in the 
college causes which was opposed to the clients who 
first engaged him as counsel, and it was as a partisan 
that, in defiance of legal ethics, he abandoned his 
clients and went over to their enemies. 

It was he who finally argued the causes before the 
Supreme Court of the United States, where he suc- 
ceeded in fixing upon the Constitution an interpretation 
which has ever since embarrassed efforts to restrain or 
regulate corporations by state or national authority. 
Simply stated, the doctrine thus established is that a 
corporate charter is a contract, and that laws enacted, 
after the granting of charters, for the regulation of cor- 
porate action, are unconstitutional, on the ground that 
they impair the obligations o\ contracts. On the first 
hearing the majority of the Supreme Court was mani- 
festly opposed to this construction, but Chief Justice 
Marshall, who leaned strongly to Webster's view, ad- 
journed the case, and. before it came up for a second 
hearing, several o\ the opposing justices, enough to 
make a majority, were induced to change their views, 
and Webster triumphed. 

The effect of this decision was important and far- 
reaching. It fearfully embarrasses legislative action 
even now. It greatly strengthened the authority o\ 



©anicl TCHcbster 109 

the Supreme Court. It subjected state legislation to 
judicial restraints greater than had before been sup- 
posed possible, and in many of the States it led to im- 
portant changes in constitutions and in the law of 
corporations designed to reserve to the legislature the 
right to modify or abrogate charters for cause. 

Webster did not return to Congress until [823. In 
1820 he served with influence and distinction in the 
very notable convention which revised, liberalized, and 
modernized the Constitution of Massachusetts. His 
fame, both as a great lawyer and as an orator, grew 
even more rapidly than the years passed by. 

In December, ;S2o, he delivered the oration on the 
two-hundredth anniversary of the Landing of the Pil- 
grims. It was, perhaps, the noblest, the most effective, 
the most eloquent of all the orations this modern 
Demosthenes ever delivered. Its eloquence not only 
moved the masses of his audience as they had never 
been moved before, but it well-nigh drove mad with 
joyous enthusiasm the most learned and the soberest- 
minded of the men who listened to its impassioned 
words. No less calm a mind than that of Mr. Ticknor 
was so overwrought by the splendid eloquence that 
for a time he could not give a lucid judgment of the 
address. 

" It must have been a great, a very great performance," Mr. 
Ticknor wrote ; " but whether it was so absolutely unrivalled as I 
imagined when I was under the immediate influence of his pres- 
ence, of his tones, of his looks, I cannot be sure till I have read it, 
for it seems to me incredible. I was never so excited by public 
speaking before in my life. Three or four times I thought my 



no Zbc Statesmen 

temples would burst with the gush of blood. . . . When 1 
came out 1 was almost afraid to come near to him. It seemed to 
me as if he was like the mount that might not be touched, and that 
burned with lire. 1 was beside myself and am so still." 

This wonderful oration — scarcely less effective in 
the reading than in the delivery— passed at once into 
the literature of the people. It was read with enthusi- 
asm everywhere, and portions of it were embodied in 
those school-books from which millions of children 
throughout the land were learning that love of country 
which, a generation later, enabled the government to call 
into the field more than two millions of men as defend- 
ers of the Union. 

It has been truly said of Webster that in this address 
and in those other orations of like exalted quality which 
followed it, he did far more than any other one man to 
cultivate among the people an undying devotion to the 
Union, and to the idea of nationality which is embodied 
in the Union. Upon such a service it is of course im- 
possible to place too high an estimate. For such a 
service no reward of honor that the people can pay can 
be deemed excessive. 

The second of Webster*s great masterpieces of 
patriotic oratory was his address at the laying of the 
corner-stone of the Bunker Hill Monument in 182s. 
The third was his noble eulogy upon John Adams and 
Thomas Jefferson in 1S20. The fourth was his second 
reply to Hayne, delivered in the Senate of the United 
States, in January, 1830. 

The orator's period of public service was almost 



Daniel Webster m 

coextensive with his manhood, and his speeches upon 
public questions were frequent and very eloquent. 
But in the four orations mentioned he reached an alti- 
tude of all-inspiring eloquence that even so divinely 
gifted an orator as he could not hope to attain upon 
any but the most exalted occasions. Had he done 
nothing else in life than give utterance to these orations 
his fame would have been secure and enduring. 

On his return to Congress, in 1821, Webster was 
made Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and in that 
capacity he drew a bill which completely remodelled 
the national criminal law, bringing order and consis- 
tency out of the chaos previously existing. He secured 
the passage of this measure, but was less successful in 
his determined opposition to Mr. Clay's protective 
tariff system. In one of the strongest, most logical, 
and most destructively analytical speeches that he ever 
made in Congress, he took his stand as the foremost 
champion of free trade, both as an abstract principle 
and as a national policy. As has already been said, he 
afterwards reversed his position on this question. His 
free-trade speech was made in behalf of New England's 
commerce, which was then the dominant interest of 
that part of the country. Four years later, when he 
repudiated his former doctrine and advocated the 
measure of extreme protection which was called the 
"tariff of abominations," New England's chief interest 
was in manufactures. In 1824, in the lower House, 
Webster stoutly contended that protection was plainly 
unconstitutional ; in 1828, in the Senate, he discovered 



H2 £bc Statesmen 

nothing in the Constitution to antagonize that policy. 
The Constitution had not been altered in the meantime, 
but conditions and opinions in New England had been 
reversed. 

Webster entered the Senate reluctantly. He pre- 
ferred the field offered to his abilities in the popular 
House, and as his re-election as often as he might desire 
was certain, the longer term in the Senate could not 
add anything to the security of his tenure of legislative 
place. But the demand of the Massachusetts Legisla- 
ture that he should represent its State in the Senate was 
too imperative to be resisted, and he was chosen to 
that service in 1827. 

In January, iS;o, the fourth of Webster's great ora- 
torical opportunities came to him. Calhoun and his 
followers were at that time believers in the right of 
a State to nullify a national statute upon grounds of 
unconstitutionality, the State, and not the courts, to be 
the judge of the constitutional question. But as yet 
the doctrine had not been openly proclaimed in the 
Senate. In January, iS^o. Senator Hayne, of South 
Carolina, in the course of debate on a question relating 
to the public lands, made an attack on New England, to 
which Webster replied in a way that stirred Hayne 
to a second and severer assault than before, and in 
this second speech the South Carolina Senator openly 
proclaimed and advocated nullification as a constitu- 
tional right. Webster then delivered his celebrated 
" Reply to Hayne," the very ablest speech he ever 
delivered in the Senate. The utterance passed at once 



Daniel Mcbster 113 

into popular literature, and for a generation afterwards 
parts of it were favorite selections for declamation in 
all the schools of the country. The speech is too 
familiarly known to everybody to require detailed 
analysis here. The keynote of its argument was that 
nullification could not be without revolution ; that 
its peaceable exercise within the Union was manifestly 
impossible ; and that its advocacy meant and could 
mean nothing other than a dissolution of the Union. 
To this argument Webster added one of the most 
persuasive and most impassioned pleas for perpetual 
union that even he ever uttered. 

The advocates of nullification argued that histori- 
cally the Union was an experimental compact between 
the States, and that the National Government was 
merely the creature of the States. So careful a student 
of history as Henry Cabot Lodge finds that the facts 
of history were thus far on the side of the nullifkation- 
ists, and that even Webster failed to break down the 
historical contention made by them. But Webster 
passed from that to higher ground. He contended 
that the Constitution was a vital thing, capable of 
growth ; that in the course of half a century it had 
changed its character, ceasing to be an experiment 
and becoming, by virtue of popular use and purpose, 
a perpetual bond of union ; that what had been at 
first a mere voluntary confederacy of States had crys- 
tallized into a nation which could not be dissolved 
into its constituent elements except by the violent 
hand of revolution. In brief, Webster's argument was 



H4 £be Statesmen 

precisely that upon which the National Government, a 
generation later, exercised the right to resist attempted 
secession by the employment of force. Without doubt, 
Webster's teaching, which had sunk deep into the 
minds and hearts of the people, was a very potent 
element of strength to the Union cause when civil war 
came with a threat to the integrity and perpetuity of 
the nation. He had done more than any other man 
to implant in the popular mind the conviction that the 
United States constitute a nation, not a confederacy,— 
a conviction so firmly rooted that neither radical 
abolitionism on the one hand nor secessionism on the 
other could turn the people from their purpose to 
maintain "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one 
and inseparable." 

In 1832, South Carolina undertook nullification in 
actual practice, and President Jackson issued his proc- 
lamation of a determination to enforce the laws at all 
hazards, and with all of power that he possessed. 
That power was manifestly inadequate, and the 
President asked Congress for specific authority to 
use the Army and Navy in compelling obedience to the 
laws. Many men in Congress, who repudiated the 
doctrine of nullification and deplored South Carolina's 
attempt to act upon it, were nevertheless unwilling to 
pass the measure asked for by the President. Then 
it was that Webster brought all the batteries of his 
legal learning and of his matchless oratory to the sup- 
port of the President in his effort to uphold the Con- 
stitution and defend the Union. In political views 



Daniel Mcbster 115 

Webster was diametrically opposed to Jackson and to 
the party that had made him President. But in this 
matter he held Jackson to be absolutely right. He 
saw in him the only force that could successfully meet 
and avert the danger to the Union which nullification 
involved. He therefore thrust all other considera- 
tions into the background and unflinchingly supported 
a President all of whose political beliefs and policies 
he detested. He did so upon the simple and sufficient 
ground that in this grave crisis Jackson was the cham- 
pion of right, and that the strengthening of his hands 
was necessary to the salvation of the country and the 
Constitution. At no crisis of his career was Webster 
greater than upon this occasion. At no time did his 
statesmanship rise to a higher level. At no time did 
he more boldly risk his reputation or more patrioti- 
cally dare hostile criticism, in obedience to his con- 
victions. He battled not for the President but for the 
national life, and in the long debate which followed 
with Calhoun he made it clear that the question at 
issue was not one to chop logic over, not one of nice 
historical or constitutional interpretation, but the simple 
one of whether the nation should survive or be de- 
stroyed, whether the Union should continue or should 
suffer disintegration. 

In the event both sides in Congress weakened, 
and under the leadership of Clay a compromise was 
effected, a new tariff bill was passed to placate the nulli- 
fiers, and they in their turn relinquished their resistance 
to the enforcement of the revenue laws. But in the 



n6 £be Statesmen 

meantime Webster had mightily reinforced among the 
people that passionate devotion to the Union which his 
eloquence had already done so much to establish. 

Having supported the President in his struggle 
with nullification, Webster with equal vigor antago- 
nized him in his warfare upon the National Bank. 
In the course of that contest Jackson claimed for the 
President, as the "direct representative of the peo- 
ple," powers, rights, and immunities such as the 
Constitution was clearly never intended to confer upon 
the executive branch of the government. He went so 
far as to rebuke Congress for venturing to censure his 
official acts, contending that that body had no con- 
stitutional right even to consider executive acts, far 
less to pass resolutions of censure upon them. In 
brief, he sought to read Cassarism into the Constitution. 
On the other hand, Webster argued a little later for 
an equally dangerous perversion of the Constitution, 
in an opposite direction. He contended that the 
power of removal from office, like the power of ap- 
pointment, is vested not in the President alone, but in 
the President "by and with the advice and consent 
of the Senate." Fortunately, neither of these per- 
versions prevailed. Either would have destroyed the 
nice balance between the executive and the legislative 
power which the framers of the Constitution wisely 
sought to establish. The one would have given 
almost dictatorial powers to the President ; the other 
would have stripped that officer of powers that are 
essential to executive independence and efficiency. 



Daniel TKflcbster n; 

When, in the early thirties, the elements of opposition 
to Jackson began to form themselves into the Whig- 
party, Webster seems to have turned his eyes tor the 
first time toward the supreme prize of American politi- 
cal life, the presidency. He was both the ablest and 
the most famous American statesman of his time, with 
Henry Clay alone for a rival. He was the recognized 
champion of the policies for which the new party 
stood ; — what was more natural than that he should 
expect to be made its candidate for the highest office 
in the country ? This ambition was destined to dis- 
appointment, and the only effect of it upon his life and 
character was detrimental. As successive quadrennial 
elections approached, each suggesting golden possi- 
bilities to his imagination, he became more and more 
careful not to give offence in any quarter from which 
support might be expected to come, more and more 
regardful of his own political interests, more and more 
a time-server for personal advantage 

In the first election in which the Whigs appeared 
as a party, the electoral vote of Massachusetts was cast 
for Webster, and that was the nearest approach he 
ever made to the coveted office. Dividing its votes 
among several candidates, the party was easily de- 
feated. In 1840, Webster's confidence was strong 
that he would be chosen as the candidate of a united 
opposition, which had every prospect of success, espe- 
cially in view of the financial disaster that had befallen 
in 1837, and which was attributed to the financial 
policy pursued by Jackson and his successor, Van 



1 1 s <lbe Statesmen 

Buren. But, returning from a summer's visit to Europe, 
Webster was sorely disappointed to learn that the 
Whigs had taken a leaf out of the Democratic book. 
They had made an appeal to unreasoning popular en- 
thusiasm by choosing William Henry Harrison for their 
leader. 

Webster supported the candidate with loyalty and 
efficient vigor, and, in answer to the invitation of Har- 
rison, who sought to surround himself with the very 
ablest men of his party, the Massachusetts statesman 
became the head of the Cabinet as Secretary of State. 
The tasks set him in this new capacity were extraordi- 
narily perplexing. Our foreign relations, particularly 
our relations with Great Britain, were threateningly 
strained. The utmost tact and circumspection were 
required at every point, for at every point there lurked 
a threat of war. As if Fate itself were hostile, Harrison 
quickly died, and his successor, Tyler, speedily broke 
with his party and deeply offended the country. All 
the members of the Cabinet except Webster resigned, 
and a great popular clamor arose against Webster's 
course in remaining a member of the offending Presi- 
dent's official family. It seems quite certain that 
Webster so remained only under a compelling sense of 
public duty. To remain was clearly dangerous to his 
own popularity and prospects. To retain his place 
was to give offence in quarters where a man with his 
ambitions could least afford to offend. To escape all 
danger, and to win a new popularity, he had only to 
resign as others had done. But, on the other hand, he 



Banie I Mcbster 119 

clearly saw that his continuance in office, pending the 
exceedingly delicate negotiations then in progress or 
in prospect, was necessary to the safety of the country 
itself. It was not certain that even he could avert 
a dangerous war with England by conducting those 
negotiations to a satisfactory conclusion. It was quite 
certain that no successor to him was likely to accom- 
plish that purpose. In this crisis Webster deliberately 
sacrificed his interests to his patriotism. He disre- 
garded the popular clamor for his resignation. He 
remained at his post, and patiently worked at the prob- 
lem of peacefully adjusting the country's international 
relations until that task was fully done. Then he re- 
signed, in 1 843, and retired to his law office in Boston. 

In 1844, Webster was again disappointed in his 
presidential hopes. Clay, with his great popularity, 
was selected to lead the Whigs, and Webster, putting 
aside any chagrin he may have felt, made a strong 
oratorical canvass in his rival's behalf. 

In the next year, Webster returned to the Senate, 
Polk being then President. Through the influence 
he had acquired with British statesmen while Secre- 
tary of State, Webster was able, by timely counsel 
to both sides, to bring about a settlement of the 
Oregon boundary dispute, which had seriously threat- 
ened a war with England. 

In 1846 came the Mexican War, leading to the 
annexation of Texas and California— a vast region out 
of which a number of States and Territories have since 
been carved. 



120 Zbc Statesmen 

Webster earnestly opposed this acquisition, clearly 
foreseeing that it would not only add largely to our 
slave territory by the admission of Texas to the Union, 
but would very certainly reopen the entire slavery 
question in forms perilous to the country's peace. 
On Webster's own ambitions the war had an almost 
immediate effect. It deprived him of the presidential 
nomination in 1S4S, when his opportunity seemed at 
last to have come to him. The glory of Taylor's 
achievements in the war had filled the country with 
an enthusiasm that was blind to all but emotional 
considerations. Taylor had never cast a vote in his 
life, and nobody knew what his political opinions 
were, if he had any, as he probably had not. But his 
military glory made him "available." and the Whigs 
nominated him, at once recognizing and insulting 
Webster by an offer of the nomination for the Vice- 
Presidency. He scornfully rejected the offer, and for 
a time refused to support the absurdly unfit candidate. 
It is interesting to reflect that, had he taken the second 
place, he would have achieved his long-cherished 
ambition, becoming President upon Taylor's death. 

The acquisition of Texas and the California country 
speedily had the effect which Webster had foreseen. 
It reopened the slavery controversy in an aggravated 
and dangerous form. The South wanted slavery in 
the newly acquired regions : the North was more and 
more opposed to any extension of the area in which 
slavery was authorized by law. Many plans of solu- 
tion were offered and rejected. Polk had proposed 



"2>antcl Mcbstcr 121 

that the question of slavery in the new Territories 
should be left open until those Territories, on becom- 
ing States, should settle the matter each in its own 
way ; but that, in the meantime, the owners of slaves 
should be permitted to take their negroes with them, 
upon emigrating to the new regions. Another pro- 
posal, which came from the South, was to extend the 
line of the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific Ocean, 
a plan which would in effect have made slave territory 
of all the region south of that line. From the North 
had come the proposal of the Wilmot Proviso, forbid- 
ding slavery in any of the newly acquired lands. The 
discussion grew daily angrier and more threatening to 
the public peace. The South demanded an effective 
law to compel the return of slaves fleeing into North- 
ern States. California, under inspiration of great gold 
discoveries, had rapidly peopled itself, mainly with 
men of the North, and was now demanding admission 
to the Union under a constitution that forbade slavery. 
This the men of the South opposed, though with 
small reason to expect success, in view of the over- 
whelming preponderance of the anti-slavery sentiment 
on the Pacific coast. Added to all this, a new political 
party was rapidly forming at the North, whose shib- 
boleth was " Free Soil." It disclaimed any purpose to 
interfere with slavery in the States where that institu- 
tion already existed, but advocated the absolute and 
perpetual exclusion of the system from all the new 
Territories. In its composition the party was of course 
purely sectional, having no being elsewhere than in 



122 £be Statesmen 

the North. On the other hand, there was growing 
up at the South a party, equally sectional, still un- 
organized but strong in numbers and influence, which 
looked to the dissolution of the Union as the only 
way out of the difficulty. 

So hotly was the conflict waged that the wisest 
statesmen became seriously apprehensive of bloody 
revolution. Then came forward Henry Clay, the great 
pacificator, with a new plan of adjustment. He pro- 
posed, by way of compromise, that California should 
be admitted, with its constitution forbidding slavery ; 
that a stringent fugitive slave law should be enacted 
and enforced with all the power of the Federal Gov- 
ernment ; that the slave trade should be forbidden 
in the District of Columbia, but that slavery should 
never be abolished there without the consent of Mary- 
land ; that Congress should declare its lack of author- 
ity to interfere with the trade in slaves between the 
States in which the system was authorized ; and that 
territorial governments should be established in the 
new possessions without any reference to slavery. 
This last was in effect a repeal of the Missouri Com- 
promise, which forbade slavery in any new State to be 
formed out of territory north of }6° 30' north latitude. 

Clay submitted his plan to Webster, who approved 
it and lent to it an advocacy without which it must 
almost certainly have failed of adoption. In its behalf 
he delivered his seventh-of-March speech — the last of 
his great orations. 

His attitude in that speech was utterly inconsistent 



2)anicl Webster 123 

with his activities on former occasions. His speech 
was a complete abandonment of the ground he had 
before held in uncompromising hostility to any exten- 
sion of slavery into new Territories. It was welcomed 
at the South and bitterly resented at the North. 
Webster's critics have always insisted that it was a 
conscienceless abandonment of principle, intended to 
win Southern support for him as a candidate for the 
presidency in 1852 ; while his apologists have as stoutly 
contended that it was inspired by his overmastering 
devotion to the Union, the perpetuity of which he had 
long held to be a consideration immeasurably supe- 
rior to all others. He himself argued that the com- 
promise measures could not work any considerable 
extension of slavery, because, as he assumed, nature 
herself had established conditions that must forever 
render negro slavery unprofitable in the greater part of 
the region in dispute. 

Upon Taylor's death, in July, 1850, Webster was 
called again to the Department of State as the head 
of Fillmore's Cabinet. This was the end of his career 
in the Senate, and the end of his life was not far off. 
In [852, he made his last effort to be nominated for 
President, and failed. He felt the disappointment 
keenly. He refused to support his successful competi- 
tor, Scott, and took no part in the campaign, during the 
progress of which he died, on October 24, 18S2. 

His career was one of almost phenomenal success, 
marred, to his appreciation, by its failure to culminate 
in the honor he most coveted. His gifts were scarcely 



i24 Gbc Statesmen 

matched by those of any other man who has played a 
large part in American history. In conspicuous ways 
he employed them for his country's good, sometimes 
at cost of self-sacrifice. Yet in other conspicuous 
ways he was often untrue to his convictions for the 
sake of personal advantage. 

He lived in princely extravagance on other people's 
money, and died amid luxurious surroundings a hope- 
less bankrupt. His extraordinary learning in the law 
seems never to have included the moral code as a 
thing of binding obligation. He lived a life, the story 
of which is full of inspiration to high endeavor, and 
equally full of warning to the consciences of those 
who ponder it. 




HENRY CLAY 

FOR nearly half a century Henry Clay was the 
most conspicuous figure in American politics, 
the most influential statesman in the Councils 
of the Nation. When he first entered the Senate, to 
serve for a single session of an unexpired term, he was 
not yet thirty years of age — being, in fact, ineligible, if 
anybody had seen fit to raise that question, as, in fact, 
nobody did. Yet he at once assumed something of 
leadership, to which his fellow senators seemed in- 
stinctively to assent. When he finally left the Senate 
chamber for his death-bed, he had reached the age of 
seventy-six years ; yet, even in the last hours of his 
service there, his was the commanding presence, his 
the dominant voice. 

And "there were giants in those days," a fact 
which emphasizes the leadership of Clay, and im- 
presses us strongly with the greatness of a mind and 
character which could so quickly seize, and so long 
hold, first place among the remarkable company of 
men who at that time had the destinies of the Re- 
public in their keeping. Webster, Calhoun, John 



126 <Tbc Statesmen 

Quincy Adams. Albert Gallatin. Mason, Marcy. Silas 
Wright, Crittenden. Randolph. Buchanan, and a score 
of other men of high distinction, were Clay's contem- 
poraries, his workfellows, or his antagonists in the di- 
rection of public affairs : but not one of them, whether 
acting with him or opposing his policies, seems ever 
seriously to have thought of questioning his leader- 
ship of the cause he espoused. Even in that haughti- 
est of haughty assemblages — the Senate of the United 
States — it was Clay's custom to take matters into his 
own hands, formulate his ideas, and present them as a 
programme, after the manner of one who speaks with 
authority. Yet his course did not offend. That which, 
in another man would have been resented as an un- 
warranted assumption of the right to dictate, was ac- 
cepted from him without protest. Often a majority 
was against him when he presented a measure or out- 
lined a policy : very often that majority yielded itself 
to the persuasiveness of his eloquence, or to the 
strangely compelling power of his will. 

He was. indeed, a born leader o\ men. The readi- 
ness with which his legislative associates accepted his 
guidance was not more remarkable than the passion- 
ate enthusiasm with which great masses of the people 
made him their political idol, blindly and unquestion- 
ingly following him— not for a brief while, after the 
manner of hero-worship, but through scores of years, 
and even unto the end, in spite of repeated and disas- 
trous defeats, in defiance of grave accusations against 
his character, in complacent disregard of clamorous 



lenry Clay 



Ibcnrp Clap 127 

slanders, and unmoved by those inconsistencies, and 
worse, which at times marred his course. 

His character and career were full of strange con- 
trasts. Meagrely educated, and throughout life unac- 
customed to thorough study, he yet impressed men 
everywhere with a belief in his superior wisdom, and 
his absolute mastery of the subjects with which he 
was called upon to deal. Greatly inferior as he was to 
Webster in his intellectual grasp, in his perception of 
principles, and in logical force, he was easily Webster's 
master in parliamentary debate and in eloquence of the 
kind that stirs men, persuades them, and in the end 
dominates them. 

Like Webster, and, indeed, in common with almost 
all the statesmen of his time, Clay was inconsistent in 
his policies, and even unfaithful at times to his own 
profoundest convictions. Deploring slavery, he began 
his public career with an earnest effort to secure its 
extinction ; yet in all the long struggle with the slave 
power he did more than any other statesman of the 
time to protect the institution against influences that 
tended to restrict and ultimately to make an end of it. 
He opposed a National Bank on the perfectly sound 
ground that such an institution must sooner or later 
come to exercise a malign and dangerous influence 
over public affairs, and become itself an agency of 
direct corruption. But half a dozen years iater he 
advocated the establishment of another National Bank, 
and when it had fulfilled all his prophecies of evil, Clay 
made himself the most impassioned of its champions, 



1^8 Che Statesmen 

the most relentless \oc o\ those who opposed it. 
Again, at the time o\ the Florida troubles. Clay con- 
tended that the Louisiana Purchase embraced and 
included all of Texas. He eloquently denounced the 
administration for surrendering our claim to that vast 
region. Yet when Texan annexation was in contem- 
plation, he was the leader o\ the opposing- forces. 
This and some other of his inconsistencies are ex- 
plainable in ways altogether creditable to him. as will 
be seen hereafter : but some o\ his somersaults. 
shiftings. and inconsistencies, as will also appear, can 
be attributed to nothing but that impairment of charac- 
ter and mind which an overweening ambition to be 
President wrought in his case as it has done in so 
many others. 

Much o\ his inconsistency maw indeed, be explained 
upon grounds that make of it. in fact, a higher con- 
sistency. Thus, when he was denounced at the North 
as a slaveholder and an apologist for slavery, while 
at the South he was stigmatized as an " abolitionist." 
both characterizations were, in a measure, correct, as 
Clay himself knew and felt. 

He did. indeed, earnestly desire the extinction of 
slavery : he did favor policies which he believed 
would ultimately accomplish that end. To that 
extent he was an " abolitionist." But. in 1S20. in [833, 
and again in 1850, as we shall see later, it was Clay 
who. by his compromises, secured for the slave States 
legislation which for the time being satisfied them. 
Under the circumstances then existing, no other man 



Ibenrp Clai? 129 

in Congress or out of it could have accomplished that 
result. To that extent he was, in fact, the champion 
of the slave power. 

There was inconsistency here, of course, and it was 
said by his enemies that he "carried water on both 
shoulders" in aid of his presidential aspirations. In 
the latter case, at least, that motive could not have 
been operative. For in i8so he had distinctly and 
finally put aside his ambition to be President, refusing 
to be considered again as a candidate in terms too 
explicit and too emphatic to leave room for doubt as 
to his sincerity. And, even as regards his action on 
the two earlier occasions of compromise, it is not 
necessary to suppose a selfish motive, in order to 
explain his course. There is another and sufficient 
explanation. From beginning to end of his career, 
Henry Clay had one all-dominating idea and purpose 
— the perpetuity and the glory of the American Union. 
To that he stood always ready to make any sacrifice. 
It was in the sincere belief that the Union was in 
danger that he brought forward his successive com- 
promise measures. Those measures did violence to 
his convictions of right, but for the sake of that Union 
which he regarded as essential to the maintenance 
of popular self-government, he advocated them. It 
was, in his belief, a sacrifice of unimportant for su- 
premely important principles, a relinquishment of the 
smaller for the greater good. 

His course on these occasions was unquestionably 
inspired by the loftiest patriotism, even when his 



i3o <Ibc Statesmen 

policies were mistaken. And it was all in accordance 
with his convictions and the temper of his mind. He 
was by nature the " great pacificator." He firmly be- 
lieved that a republic, and more especially a federal 
republic, could be held together only by a spirit of 
mutual concession and a policy of compromise. In 
that belief, and for the sake of the country's life, he 
advocated measures that could not satisfy either him- 
self or any partisan on either side— measures that were 
bound of necessity to bring condemnation and distrust 
upon himself from both sides. He did not compre- 
hend the truth that there was an " irrepressible con- 
flict " between the advocates and the opponents of 
slavery. He did not fully or clearly understand that, 
as Lincoln later phrased it. this Republic could not 
"permanently endure half free and half slave." He 
believed that all questions arising out of slavery could 
be adjusted by compromise and permanently set at 
rest. To that end he labored, only to find that after 
each settlement the issue again and quickly presented 
itself, usually in a more dangerous form than before. 
With respect to tariff protection. Clay's opinions un- 
derwent a radical change, as indeed did those of most 
statesmen of that time on both sides of the issue. 
Webster began as a declared free-trader by opposing 
Clay's "American System," and ridiculing it. He 
ended by advocating and voting for the most extreme 
protectionist measures that were ever thought of during 
the first half of the nineteenth century. Calhoun be- 
gan by demanding protection as a "right" o\~ the 



1bciu\> Clay 131 

Southern States, and ended as the author and advo- 
cate of nullification as a necessary means of ridding the 
South of what he held to be unendurable oppression 
in the shape of a protective tariff. Clay's change of 
view was scarcely less radical. At first he was a free- 
trader in principle, and advocated only a very mild 
measure of protection, to be continued only for a brief 
period. He desired simply to use protective duties so 
far as might be necessary to render the country inde- 
pendent of foreign markets in time of war. That is to 
say, he desired a very moderate protection, applied only 
to the manufacture of clothing and military and naval 
supplies, especially the hempen rope for which the 
farmers of his own State furnished the raw material. 
He did not desire to encourage manufactures generally. 
He looked with something akin to abhorrence upon 
the suggestion that the United States might ultimately 
become a great manufacturing nation, able to export 
the products of its skilled labor. He declared the 
natural industry of this country to be farming, and held 
that the exports of the United States should always 
consist of agricultural products. He pointed to the 
condition of things in Manchester and Birmingham as 
a warning to his countrymen of the danger of so 
stimulating manufactures as to create a large class of 
operatives, dependent upon mill-work for their living. 
He hoped to limit protection to such moderate and 
temporary encouragement as might be necessary to 
enable the country to provide for its people's simplest 
necessities, with the aid of such domestic weaving as 



132 Sbc Statesmen 

was then common in western and southern house- 
holds. 

This was his attitude in the year 1S10. Eight years 
later he was the champion and sponsor of protection 
for its own sake, and o\ the farthest expansion of 
manufacturing industry that tariff duties could bring 
about. He called that the " American system," though, 
as Webster pointed out, ours was the only civilized 
country that had never adopted it. The opposite sys- 
tem he dubbed " European," though, as Webster again 
demonstrated, no European country had ever accepted 
it. His phrases were meant to be catch words, disin- 
genuously appealing to ignorant patriotism. He de- 
liberately declared that the prosperity of every country 
was measured by the extent to which it " protected" 
its industries, citing England, with its then oppressive 
laws in restraint of importation, as an example to be 
imitated in America. A few years later, in 1833, he 
pushed through Congress a tariff measure of a directly 
opposite character, providing for the gradual but rapid 
lowering of duties to a revenue basis, and the great 
enlargement of the free list. 

For his course in this latter case, the explanation 
was obvious enough. South Carolina had gone into a 
species of revolt against the extremely high tariff meas- 
ure of 1828 and Clay's amendments of 1S12. Nulli- 
fication had been decreed by a convention of that 
State, and Clay believed, not without reason, that in 
spite of Jackson's firmness, the Union was in serious 
danger of disruption and a devastating civil war. To 



1bcnr\> Clay 133 

save the Union, he stood ready to sacrifice protection 
or anything else. It was solely as a Union-saving 
compromise that he conceived and put through Con- 
gress his low-tariff bill of 1813. 

Clay had the very meagrest educational advantages, 
and it was never his habit to repair the deficiency by 
systematic or even diligent reading. His great readi- 
ness of mind and his unusual capacity to absorb 
information, enabled him' quickly to achieve a super- 
ficial mastery of any subject with which he was called 
upon to deal, but he was content with superficiality, 
depending upon his intellectual alertness, and his 
almost incredible aptitude in presenting a case, to 
make his acquirements seem profound. 

He was born in the slashes of Hanover County, 
Virginia, on April 12, 1777. The only schools he ever 
attended were of the "old field" kind, and there he 
learned only reading, writing, and elementary arith- 
metic. At the age of fourteen he went to Richmond, 
where he served for a year as a boy in a store. A 
year afterward he secured employment in the clerk's 
office of the Court of Chancery. A little later he be- 
came amanuensis to Chancellor George Wythe, the 
head of the High Court, and his association with 
that able and high-minded jurist did much to direct 
Clay's youthful mind toward better things than his 
surroundings might otherwise have suggested. From 
Wythe, certainly, Clay imbibed his early views as to 
slavery. Wythe was one of the many Virginians of 
his time who regarded negro slavery as a wrong to 



i34 Cbc Statesmen 

the negro and a curse to the white man— an inherit- 
ance of evil which it was desirable to get rid o\ as 
speedily as possible. Accordingly, he had manumitted 
his own slaves and expended the greater part o\ his 
fortune in providing them with the means o\ self-sup- 
port. The sentiment and the convictions that inspired 
him were common in Virginia at that day, and such a 
man as George Wythe could give free utterance to 
them without fear of offending. 

From the Chancellor's service, young Clay passed 
to a law office as a student, and with only such super- 
ficial knowledge of the law as a single year of study 
could give him he was admitted to the bar. Thus 
equipped, he set out for Kentucky, whither his mother 
and his stepfather had preceded him. He was at that 
time only twenty years of age. yet he quickly won 
success at the bar. and became remarked as a young 
man of unusual intellectual gifts. When only twenty- 
two years old. Clay took an active part as a speaker in 
the canvass for the election of a convention to revise 
the constitution of Kentucky. With a courage that 
must be admired, he advocated a constitutional pro- 
vision for the gradual emancipation of the slaves in 
that State, and so brilliant was his oratory that, al- 
though his cause was overwhelmingly defeated, his 
espousal of the unpopular view did not impair his 
young tame or seriously interfere with his political 
prospects. In 1803 he was elected to the Legislature. 
In 1806 he was so far distinguished as a lawyer that 
Aaron Burr employed him as counsel. In the same 



Ibcnrp Clap 135 

year he was appointed to fill a vacancy in the United 
States Senate, where he immediately took a leading 
part in debate and on important committees. His 
term ended in March, 1807, and he was elected again 
to the Kentucky Legislature, where his capacity of 
leadership was promptly recognized by his elevation 
to the speakership of the Assembly. It was at this 
time that the growing intensity of the anti-British feel- 
ing found insane expression in a bill to forbid the citing 
of British court decisions or the reading of British law 
text-books in the courts of Kentucky. But for Clay's 
influence, that absurd and destructive measure would 
have been made into law. Clay left the chair and, in 
one of his singularly lucid expository speeches, so far 
enlightened the minds of his fellow-legislators as to save 
the State from the proposed folly. 

It was at this time, too, that he first put forward his 
doctrine of home manufacture, in a resolution urging 
Kentucky legislators and officials to wear no clothing 
not made in America. Politics and law-giving were 
attended in those days with more or less of danger, 
and Clay was wounded in a duel with Humphrey 
Marshall, growing out of the debate on this resolution. 
Later in life, Clay severely condemned duelling as bar- 
barous, unchristian, and unworthy of civilized men. 
But with that inconsistency which was characteristic 
of him, he not long after that utterance fought with John 
Randolph. As he continued all his life to desire the 
extinction of slavery, and to pride himself on his early 
advocacy of emancipation, yet continued also to hold 



136 Gbe Statesmen 

slaves and to advocate measures in behalf of slavery, 
so he condemned duelling but continued to prac- 
tise it. 

In 1809, Clay was again made a Senator of the 
United States, to fill out the two years of an unexpired 
term. During this period he for the first time fully 
expounded his policy of narrowly limited tariff protec- 
tion, designed to render the country independent of 
foreign markets in time of war, but to avoid the ex- 
tensive diversion of capital from agriculture to manu- 
factures, and especially to avoid the creation of a 
a msiderable class of mill-operatives. It was during the 
next few years, also, that he supported in the House the 
West Florida occupation, put forth the theory that 
the Louisiana Purchase included Texas, and opposed 
the renewal of the charter of the United States Bank 
on the ground that the creation of such a corporation 
by the national authority was manifestly unconstitu- 
tional, and that the existence of the bank was danger- 
ous to the public welfare. His argument in this behalf 
was so able and convincing that even he could not 
satisfactorily answer it when he afterwards became the 
bank's champion. 

In 181 1, Clay was for the first time elected to the 
House of Representatives, and so well recognized was 
his gift of leadership that he was at once made Speaker. 
During all the succeeding time of his service in the 
House, he was chosen Speaker in every Congress 
almost without opposition, except on a few occasions, 
when for personal reasons he refused the office. From 



Ibcnrp CIa\> 137 

first to last there was nobody to question his primacy 
in a body that directly represented the people. 

Clay promptly made himself the foremost cham- 
pion of war with England. He used all his splendid 
eloquence in "tiring the popular heart" against British 
aggressions. He pictured to the country a gloriously 
victorious struggle, embracing the conquest of Canada, 
the capture of Quebec, and a peace to be dictated by 
American commissioners at Halifax. So convincing 
were his plans of campaign, and so fascinating his 
foreshadowings of glorious victory, that Gallatin had 
to labor with President Madison to prevent him from 
appointing Clay Commander-in-chief of the armies 
in the tield. 

The contrast between the all-conquering career 
predicted for our armies by the orator who was chiefly 
instrumental in bringing the war about, and the actual 
occurrences of that war, would have destroyed the 
popularity of almost any other man than Clay. He, 
strange favorite of fortune, was scarcely at all hurt by 
the humiliation inflicted upon the country. After our 
attempts upon Canada had ended in disastrous re- 
verses and in the shameful surrender of Hull's army, 
—after the British had ravaged our coasts, made them- 
selves masters of Washington City, burned the Capi- 
tol, destroyed the public records, and subjected our 
national pride to a bitter humiliation which was not 
yet solaced by Jackson's extraordinary victory at New 
Orleans,— after all this, Clay was still so conspicuous 
a statesman that he was made one of the commissioners 



138 £bc Statesmen 

to negotiate the treaty of Ghent So sorely, how- 
ever, did he personally feel the shame of the outcome, 
that when, after the signing of a peace treaty, he was 
ordered to London to assist in the negotiation of a 
commercial treaty, he hesitated, lingering in Paris until 
news of Jackson's victory in a battle fought after the 
conclusion of peace brought solace to his mind, and 
gave the people at home an opportunity to vaunt 
American superiority in arms as one of the truths de- 
monstrated by the war. 

Clay's star showed no dimming. He was still in 
favor with the administration, and almost an object of 
worship among the people. Madison offered him the 
high post of Minister to Russia, which he declined. 
The people of his district again chose him to represent 
them in Congress, and on his return to Washington 
in December, 181s, the House promptly elected him 
Speaker, with scarcely any opposition. 

He now brought forward his first protective tariff 
measure, known in history as the tariff of 18 16. It 
represented a remarkable change in his views on the 
subject of protection. The rates of duty imposed by 
the measure were very moderate in comparison with 
those afterwards advocated by Clay, but they were 
imposed with the distinct and avowed purpose of 
protecting manufactures, and creating the very con- 
ditions which Clay had before so eloquently depre- 
cated as dangerous to the happiness and even to the 
liberties of the people. He still clung to the belief, 
or put forward the pretence, that the protective sys- 



Ibcnrp Clap 139 

tern was only a temporary expedient, intended to meet 
a situation which must presently pass away ; that as 
soon as our " infant industries " were able to maintain 
themselves without government aid, they would cease 
to ask sustenance from the law ; that as soon as they 
were able to walk alone, they would cast aside the 
crutches of protection ; and that the people had only 
to submit to a temporary exaction of tribute in order 
to see these industrial children, nourished into a lusty 
and helpful youth, needing and asking nothing further 
of their nursing mother, the government. 

It is possible that Clay believed all this. It is pos- 
sible that the ingenuity of his intellect was sufficient 
to deceive himself, as it deceived others, with these 
predictions of altruism on the part of those to whom 
the people were asked to pay tribute. If so, how 
greatly he was misled ! How fallacious was his fore- 
sight ! How conspicuously his prophecies failed of 
fulfilment ! 

The fact seems to be that Clay always deceived 
himself when the deception served his cherished pur- 
poses. Imperfectly educated as he was, untrained in 
thorough research, instinctively and by habit content 
with superficial inquiry, enthusiastic far beyond the 
common, and gifted with a highly creative imagina- 
tion, he was always able to persuade himself of the 
soundness of any views that might accord with his 
immediate desires, however flatly they might contra- 
dict his views of the day before. 

His course in 18 16 afforded another illustration of 



ho Gbe Statesmen 

these tendencies. We have seen that he made him- 
self the most conspicuous adversary of the United 
States Bank when it sought to have its charter renewed 
in 1S11. He opposed it on every ground. He held 
that it threatened the creation of a great, oppressive, 
and dangerously corrupting money-power, immeas- 
urably inimical to the public welfare and peculiarly 
menacing to free popular government. He went 
farther, and challenged the constitutionality of the act 
under which the bank existed. Still further, he con- 
tended that Congress could not enact any consti- 
tutional measure chartering a bank or any other 
corporation. In one of the most logical and convin- 
cing speeches he ever made, he argued that the Con- 
stitution makes no grant of such power, and dwelt 
upon the absurdity of the claim that a grant of such 
power could be in any wise inferred or implied as 
incidental to the exercise of any of the granted powers 
of the National Government. He made, in short, the 
very ablest and most conclusive argument that was 
ever made by anybody to show both the unconstitu- 
tionality and the extreme undesirability of a National 
Bank's existence. It was largely due to his efforts 
that the charter renewal was withheld and that the 
bank went out of being. Between that time and the 
year 1816 there had been no change in the Constitu- 
tion or in the principles of constitutional interpre- 
tation; certainly nothing had occurred to render a vast 
organized money-power less dangerous to the public 
welfare than it had been half a dozen years before. 



"Ibenrp Clap 141 

Yet in 18 16, when it was proposed to establish another 
Bank of the United States, Clay easily persuaded him- 
self that the constitutional objections which he had 
before urged with such force and fervor were unsound, 
and that the dangers to popular liberty before which 
he had stood appalled were chimerical. So over- 
mastering was his influence in this new and strange 
behalf that it is not exaggeration to call him the 
creator of the bank which in 18 16 received a charter 
to run during the next twenty years. 

in that and the immediately succeeding years, Clay 
busied himself with efforts to establish a system of 
internal improvements— canals, roads, etc.— to be con- 
structed by the National Government. He also 
strenuously advocated the recognition of the Spanish 
American Republics. His fervid imagination then, 
and for years afterwards, pictured those turbulent 
and chronically revolutionary states as republics like our 
own, founded upon well-ordered conceptions of human 
liberty and popular self-government. His fancy could 
scarcely have gone further astray. But the generosity 
and high patriotism that inspired his course under this 
mistaken conception of facts did honor to his charac- 
ter, to say the least of the matter. 

He continued to be Speaker in the successive Con- 
gresses, and in all of them exercised an influence 
which it would be impossible for the very wisest and 
ablest to command in our time. Congress was then 
a deliberative assembly, and not, as now, a mere col- 
lection of carefully selected committees. There were 



i-p 3bc Statesmen 

no "gag" rules to prevent debate. Orators in Con- 
gress were at that day accustomed to speak, not 
merely " for the Record," but with actual intent to 
influence the votes of members, and very generally 
with that result. Clay, although Speaker, was ac- 
customed to take a large and very masterful part in 
the debates, especially making the sessions in Com- 
mittee of the Whole his opportunity. 

Another circumstance that enabled Clay at that time 
to make all his influence effective, was the absence of 
party divisions. The Federalist party was dead by 
suicide. Its unpatriotic course and attitude during the 
War of 1S12-1S had completely discredited and de- 
stroyed it. Moreover, the republicanism of Jefferson, 
which had been gravely feared in the early days of the 
Republic as something akin to anarchism, or at the 
least something with anarchistic tendencies, had com- 
mended itself during the sixteen years of Jefferson's 
and Madison's administrations, and when Monroe be- 
came President there was no party left in opposition. 
Even those who had been the Federalist leaders, or a 
majority of them, had accepted the more liberal doc- 
trines and policies of the party of young America. 

In these circumstances personal influence, skill in 
debate, and persuasive eloquence were far more effec- 
tive forces of legislation than under ordinary conditions. 
They encountered no strong party spirit. They were 
not battled of their purposes by the organized and 
drilled forces of party opposition. 

It was under these conditions that Clay was called 



Ibenq? Clap 143 

upon to deal, for the first time, with a great, strenuous, 
country-racking issue. The Territory of Missouri, a part 
of the Louisiana Purchase, sought admission to the 
Union as a State in 1819. Slavery existed in the Terri- 
tory and the people there desired to continue it. It 
was proposed in Congress that an enabling act should 
be passed, permitting Missouri to adopt a constitution 
and apply for admission. An attempt was made to 
insert a clause in this enabling act, providing that the 
constitution of the new State should forbid slavery, 
and making that a condition of admission. Thus, for 
the first time the slavery question presented itself in 
Congress in a practical and seriously disturbing form. 
Clay— though he deprecated slavery, advocated gradual 
emancipation, and hoped for the ultimate extinction of 
the system — nevertheless opposed with all his force 
and fervor this restrictive clause, designed to prevent 
the extension of slavery into new territory. Debate 
ran high in Congress and in the country. Finally Clay 
adopted and made his own a plan of compromise sug- 
gested by Senator Thomas of Illinois. This plan was 
to admit Missouri as a slave State, but to provide by 
law that slavery should not thereafter be permitted in 
any State formed out of territory lying north of }6° 30', 
north latitude,— that being the southern boundary line 
of Missouri. Under Clay's strong advocacy, this com- 
promise measure was adopted. 

But the matter did not end there. When Missouri 
made formal application for statehood it was found that 
her proposed constitution not only authorized slavery, 



144 Gbe Statesmen 

but forbade free negroes from other States to immigrate 
into her Territory. Instantly the controversy was re- 
opened in a more difficult form than before, and Clay, 
in his character of "the great pacificator," seemed a 
reference of the matter to a special committee, of which 
he was made chairman. In conjunction with a like 
committee o\ the Senate, this body adopted and re- 
ported a resolution, drawn by Clay, to the effect that 
Missouri should be admitted upon condition that the 
Mate should never enact a law forbidding any class of 
American citizens from settling within her borders. 
The adoption of this resolution, Missouri's assent to it, 
and her admission to the Union in 1821, completed the 
fam< uis Missouri Compromise. It was the first of those 
pacifications which Clay's life-long policy of concession 
and compromise brought into being. He. and indeed 
most of the statesmen of the time, fondly believed that 
it would make an end o\ all irritation growing out of 
the slavery issue. Texas. New Mexico. California, and 
Utah were not then United States possessions, even in 
prospect. Louisiana was already a State. The com- 
promise seemed, therefore, to limit the future extension 
o\ slavery to the single Territory o\ Arkansas, while 
providing that all the remainder o\ the Louisiana Pur- 
chase should come into the Union only as free States. 
It was everywhere believed to be a permanent settle- 
ment o\ all questions touching slavery extension. Men 
did not then foresee the annexation o\ Texas and the 
acquisition of New Mexico. California, and Utah. Nor 
did they sufficiently take into account the fact that one 



Ibenn? Clap 145 

Congress cannot bind another ; that a law is always 
subject to repeal by the same power that enacted it ; 
that the Missouri Compromise was effected by the mere 
enactment of a statute which Congress could repeal at 
pleasure. Nevertheless, for the time being, the com- 
promise did settle the slavery question and remove it 
from politics as a subject of irritating controversy. 

At the end of this Congress, Clay declined a re-elec- 
tion. His personal finances needed his attention, and 
with a view to their repair he returned to the practice 
of his profession, a practice which was always lucra- 
tive when he had time to attend to it. But after a 
brief interval he was again made a Representative. 
When he returned to Congress in December, -1823, he 
was immediately chosen again to the Speakership. In 
that Congress he made his second marked advance to- 
ward extreme protection, with his tariff of 1824. 

It was in 1824 that he first came before the country 
as a candidate for the presidency. The conditions 
were peculiar, and at first they seemed strongly to 
favor Clay. As has been already explained in this 
essay, there was only one party in the country, which 
is equivalent to saying that there was none. Practi- 
cally all men were Republicans. Four years before 
Monroe had been elected to a second term almost 
without opposition, only one electoral vote being cast 
against him. But while the " era of good feeling," as 
it was called, had not yet given place in 1824 to a 
party division, there were strong personal rivalries in 
play, and Clay was one of four candidates for the 



146 Gbe Statesmen 

presidency — the other three being Andrew Jackson, 
John Quincy Adams, and William H. Crawford. Adams 
was the legitimate successor of Monroe, according to 
the tradition then prevailing, which made the Secre- 
tary of State heir presumptive if not quite heir appar- 
ent. Jackson ran upon the record o\ his astonishing 
military achievements, and was a popular idol. Craw- 
ford had much strength, and was supported by many 
politicians o\ shrewdness and great industry. Clay 
was unquestionably the most influential statesman of 
the time, and his very legitimate aspirations were sup- 
ported by an almost passionate popularity. But for 
the furor of enthusiasm awakened in behalf of Jackson 
by the memory o\ his military exploits, and by the 
feeling among the people West and South that he alone 
of the candidates was one of themselves, there is little 
reason to doubt that Clay's chances of election would 
have been excellent. As it was. he was fourth in the 
poll iA electoral votes, and the election was thrown 
into the House o\ Representatives. There the voting 
was by States, each State having one vote and no 
more, and Clay was not eligible, by reason o\ the con- 
stitutional requirement that the House should choose a 
President from among the three candidates having the 
highest number of electoral votes. As he was not one 
of those three he could not be made President, but he 
was obviously the President-maker. His influence 
in the House was so dominant that, as every one 
clearly saw. the choice o( a president in effect rested 
with him. Crawford having become almost helpless 



1bciu*\) Clap 147 

in consequence of a paralytic stroke, the choice lay 
between Jackson and Adams alone, and their respec- 
tive partisans entered into a fierce struggle for the 
favor of Clay, who for a considerable time did not in- 
dicate his intentions. Jackson and he were not on 
good terms. He had censured Jackson's course in 
Florida, criticising the general somewhat severely in a 
speech in Congress. Jackson had shown his resent- 
ment in successive affronts to Clay, and the two had 
ceased to associate in any way. But Jackson now 
sought a reconciliation with the man who could make 
him President or defeat him for that office, as he might 
choose. A peace was effected over a succession of 
dinners, but Clay did not yet declare his purpose. 
Jackson's friends induced the Kentucky Legislature to 
request that State's members of Congress to vote for 
him, but Clay paid no heed to the request, and the 
members from Kentucky remained obedient to Clay's 
will. Finally, an attempt was made to frighten Clay from 
his anticipated purpose to give his influence to Adams. 
Through an anonymous letter, afterwards avowed by 
a ridiculously unimportant member of Congress from 
Pennsylvania, it was asserted that Clay and Adams 
had made a corrupt bargain, by the terms of which 
Clay was to secure Adams's election and Adams in 
return was to make Clay Secretary of State. Clay de- 
nounced the charge as an atrocious falsehood, and the 
House sustained him. Hut the cry of "bargain ami 
corruption " would not down. Although Adams testi- 
fied to its falsity, and its malignant untruth was 



148 ftbe Statesmen 

otherwise made apparent, it was repeated by Jackson 
and his friends for almost a generation afterwards, to 
Clay's great disadvantage. 

To this result Clay himself somewhat contributed. 
When the day of election came Clay and his following 
supported Adams, electing him on the first ballot, and 
when Adams made up his Cabinet Clay accepted the 
post of Secretary of State. There is now no doubt 
that Adams in offering him the place consulted only the 
public welfare, or that Clay, in accepting it, acted with 
entirely upright motives. But to great multitudes of 
people the facts presented themselves as conclusive 
proof oi the truth of the old, scandalous charge. Jack- 
son aided it by insisting, then and afterwards, that he 
had been cheated of the office, and that the will of the 
people, expressed in his plurality of electoral votes, 
had beer, overridden by a corrupt bargain. Jackson 
probably believed this to be true. It was his habit of 
mind to believe every man a scoundrel who differed 
with him in opinion, and especially every man who 
stood in the way of his purposes. Others believed it, 
too, and not long after Clay became Secretary of State, 
John Randolph, whether he believed it or not, openly 
denounced both Clay and Adams, characterizing their 
official association as " the coalition of 3 1 i til and Black 
George, the combination of the Puritan with the black- 
leg." A duel between Clay and Randolph resulted. 

A great hostility to the administration arose. In 
Congress and in the country a party division was 
formed, not upon any question of principle or policy, 



Ibcnrp Cla\> 149 

but solely upon the issue of support or hostility to the 
administration. Its every act was questioned and re- 
sisted. Its purposes were denounced, and Jackson, in 
a letter, went so far as to suggest that Adams held office 
illegally and by usurpation. The old " bargain and 
corruption " charge was reiterated and again refuted, 
this time by testimony that could not reasonably be 
questioned. But Jackson calmly asserted that the testi- 
mony offered in refutation of it in fact proved its truth, 
and the unreading and unthinking multitude accepted 
that view. Still viler charges were made against 
Adams, one of them accusing him of personal conduct 
in Russia which would be possible only to the lowest 
and most depraved of human beings. 

The result of all this appeared in the election for the 
twentieth Congress. When that body assembled in 
December, 1827, it had a majority opposed to the ad- 
ministration, a thing unprecedented in the history of 
the country. The session of 1827-28 was stormy be- 
yond anything ever before seen, and resulted in the 
enactment of only one bill of public consequence — the 
"tariff of abominations." 

Meantime the presidential campaign was in progress. 
Adams was of course a candidate for re-election, and, 
equally of course, Jackson was the candidate in opposi- 
tion. It is entirely safe and not extravagant to say that 
this was the bitterest, most scandalous, and most de- 
moralizing canvas ever made in the country, before or 
since. The shame of it was so great that many enlight- 
ened men in all parts of the country began to despair 



150 Z\k Statesmen 

of the Republic, and o\ the system upon which it 
rests. 

Jackson was elected, and Clay, though himself not 
a candidate, was deeply grieved at a result which 
seemed to reflect upon himself. 

In 1831, Clay accepted an election to the Senate, and 
during the next year busied himself with a new tariff 
measure, amending that of 1S2S, and strengthening 
some of its protective features, while lowering the duties 
on articles not made in this country, in order to reduce 
the revenues, which were already excessive, and which 
promised to become dangerously so with the extin- 
guishment of the public debt, then near at hand. 

It was in resistance to the tariff of 1S2S. as amended 
by Clay's bill o\ [832, that nullification was attempted 
in South Carolina. Jackson took resolute ground in 
opposition to the movement, declared in a proclama- 
tion that he would enforce the laws at all costs, and 
called upon Congress for the military means and au- 
thority to do so. For a time there was very grave 
apprehension throughout the country. The disruption 
of the Union was threatened, and civil war seemed im- 
minent. Again Clay came forward in his character of 
"pacificator." He framed and succeeded in passing a 
new tariff bill which provided for a gradual and pro- 
gressive lowering of the protective duties to about the 
rate imposed by the mild first protective tariff meas- 
ure—that of 1S10. The compromise was effected 
mainly by Clay's exertions. Nullification ceased its 
menace, and the country was again at rest. Clay had 



1benr\> Clap 151 

won new credit, and in a great degree recovered the 
ground lost during the presidential campaign of 1832. 

But in that campaign he had made the worst blunder 
of his life. He was put in nomination for the presi- 
dency as a candidate of the new National Republican 
or Whig party,— the party opposing Jackson. He de- 
liberately forced into the campaign an issue which, but 
for his initiative, would not have been raised at that 
time, and upon that issue mainly he lost the election. 
Jackson had sent three messages to Congress, criticis- 
ing the Bank of the United States. In the first and 
second messages he had suggested that instead of re- 
newing the charter of that institution, Congress should 
create a bank of different character. Congress had re- 
fused to consider the matter seriously, the President's 
own adherents refusing to support his proposal, while 
his Secretary of the Treasury made elaborate reports in 
support of the existing institution, reports in precise 
contradiction of Jackson's assumptions. Accordingly, 
in his third message, Jackson had expressed his wish 
to drop the matter. 

The bank's charter would not expire until 1836, 
three years after the expiration of Jackson's first term. 
There was, therefore, not the slightest occasion for 
Congress to deal with the matter in 1811-32. Still less 
was there reason to thrust the bank question into the 
presidential campaign of 1832, at risk, and indeed with 
the certainty, of losing the votes of all men who thought 
the bank a source of danger. But in the face of advice 
to the contrary, urged upon him by his most devoted 



152 Gbc Statesmen 

and wisest supporters, Clay insisted upon making the 
question of rechartering the bank the " dominant 
issue " of the campaign. To that end he had the con- 
vention that nominated him issue a " ringing " address 
on the subject, and persuaded the bank to make im- 
mediate application to Congress for the renewal of its 
charter. 

Clay's purpose in all this was to make an issue on 
which he could defeat Jackson. He made one on which 
Jackson defeated him overwhelmingly. Years before, 
as we have seen, Clay had made an elaborate argument 
to show the unconstitutionality of the bank's existence; 
in vetoing the recharter bill, Jackson deliberately 
adopted Clay's own reasoning on that point, to the 
orator's immitigable confusion. On that earlier occa- 
sion, too, Clay had sought to alarm the people with 
the spectre of a great, chartered money-power, threat- 
ening to liberty, corrupting statesmen for its own 
advantage, using its resources for political purposes, 
and making of itself an unscrupulous and well-nigh 
irresistible force in the control of elections and legisla- 
tion. In 1832 he deliberately sought to fulfil his own 
prophecy. He forced the bank to take a dangerously 
active part in politics in his behalf, to the very great 
alarming of the people. He had thought, by thrusting 
the bank issue into the campaign., to alienate from 
Jackson those of his party who shared the opinion of 
Jackson's Secretary of the Treasury, that the bank was 
sound, well managed, and publicly useful, and that it 
ought to receive an extension of its charter ; he sue- 



1bcnr\> Clap 153 

ceeded instead in driving such men into hostility to the 
bank as the enemy of Jackson. He succeeded also in 
alienating many of his own adherents, who, taking 
alarm at the bank's interference in politics, abandoned 
his support on that issue alone. Thousands of voters 
who had never before thought or cared anything about 
the bank were awakened to the danger that lurked in 
its vast and unrestrained power. They saw it for the 
first time endeavoring to control an election and itself 
choose a president to its liking. They understood for 
the first time how, by granting or withholding its 
favors, it could make or mar the fortune of individuals; 
how, in the same way, it could bring prosperity to one 
city, or state, or section, and distress and ruin to an- 
other ; how it even held in its hands the power to con- 
trol the financial markets of the entire country, making 
money scarce or plentiful as the speculative purposes 
of its managers might suggest,— a power which the 
bank actually exercised a little later with results calam- 
itous to the country. In brief, scores of thousands who 
had never before concerned themselves with the mat- 
ter were taught to look upon the bank as the all- 
threatening monster that Jackson represented it to be, 
and to regard Jackson as the only man who could save 
them from its clutch. 

If Clay had not forced this issue into the campaign, 
if he had not needlessly compelled the bank to engage 
in political activities that alarmed the people and justi- 
fied Jackson's attitude, he might or might not have 
become President. But having made that blunder, his 



154 £be Statesmen 

case was hopeless. He was himself indeed confident 
to the end, and the result was a staggering blow to 
him. Jackson had 219 electoral votes ; Clay only 49. 

The nullification crisis, of which an account has 
already been given, occurred in 1873. Clay shared 
Jackson's view of nullification and, as we have seen, 
devised as a remedy his compromise tariff bill, reliev- 
ing the country of onerous protective duties by annual 
reductions, until the maximum should fall in 1S41 to 
twenty per cent. But it was not upon many subjects 
that Clay and Jackson could agree, and the Senate 
leader was soon as bitterly at war with the President 
as ever. Clay opposed Jackson at every point, and 
with an extreme bitterness of personal feeling which 
Jackson returned with interest. The crisis came on the 
subject of the bank. Not content with having vetoed 
the bill to extend that institution's charter, and fearing 
that it might have better success during the three 
years it had yet to live, Jackson determined to de- 
stroy it without waiting for the expiration of its lease 
of existence. He ordered the Secretary of the Treasury, 
who alone had legal authority to do so, to remove the 
government deposits from the bank. The Secretary 
refused. Jackson substituted another Secretary for 
him, but he too refused to obey the mandate. Then 
Jackson gave the place to Roger B. Taney, who did his 
will by ordering that there should be no further deposits 
of government funds in the bank, and that the funds 
already there should be drawn out, as needed to meet 
treasury expenditures, until all were withdrawn. This 



"Ibenrp Clap 155 

was done upon Jackson's actual or pretended conviction 
that the bank was financially unsound, and therefore 
an unfit custodian of the government's money. But 
there is no room for doubt that he was chiefly influ- 
enced by resentment of the bank's efforts to defeat his 
election. 

The bank retaliated by enormously curtailing its 
loans, upon the plea that the prospective withdrawal 
of the deposits compelled it to that course. The real 
purpose seems clearly to have been to cripple business, 
and thus compel a relenting in the warfare upon the 
bank — perhaps even to arouse an overmastering popu- 
lar sentiment in favor of extending its lease of life. 

The excitement was intense. All else in politics was 
subordinated to this issue, and in the debates that fol- 
lowed the most virulent personalities often took the 
place of argument. Clay levelled his heaviest guns at 
the President. He introduced resolutions in the Senate 
censuring Jackson and declaring that the President had 
"assumed upon himself authority and power not con- 
ferred by the Constitution and laws." After an acri- 
monious debate, the Senate adopted Hie resolutions, 
and Jackson replied with a "protest," which he de- 
manded should be recorded on the journal of the Sen- 
ate. In this astonishing document he declared that the 
Senate had transcended its constitutional authority by 
adopting, and even by considering, such resolutions. 
He urged that the Senate's action had been in effect an 
impeachment, without any of the prescribed forms and 
safeguards of a trial. He claimed for the President, as. 



156 £bc Statesmen 

"the direct representative of the people," powers and 
duties never before suggested, and declared it to be his 
right and his duty to protect the Republic, if need be, 
against senatorial usurpation, and much else of an as- 
tonishing sort. Clay replied with eloquent denuncia- 
tion, and later made a serious effort to curtail the 
President's powers. He sought to repeal the law which 
limited government officers to four-years' terms, and to 
secure an enactment forbidding the President to remove 
office-holders from place without the advice and con- 
sent of the Senate, after the submission o\ reasons for 
the proposed removal. This effort led to sharp debate, 
but it came to nothing. A few years later, Jackson's 
friends being in a majority in the Senate, a resolution 
was brought forward to expunge from the Senate rec- 
ords Clay's resolutions of censure upon Jackson. This 
called forth from Clay one of the most eloquent speeches 
he ever made, in which he denounced Jackson with a 
passionate fervor such as only he knew how to mani- 
fest while keeping within the rules of debate. 

Meanwhile the bank, as a national institution, was 
dead. It continued business for a time under a state 
charter, but ultimately failed, its stockholders losing all 
their investments. The condition thus revealed was 
cited by Jackson's friends as proof that the institution 
had been bankrupt when he had declared it to be so— 
a conclusion which did not logically follow from the 
premises, whether it was in fact correct or not. 

During the session o\ [835-36 the slavery question, 
after its habit, presented itself again in Congress in dis- 



Ibenrp Clap 157 

turbing shape. The sentiment in favor of abolition had 
led to the formation of anti-slavery societies throughout 
the North, but especially in New England. These so- 
cieties bombarded Congress with petitions for the abo- 
lition of slavery in the District of Columbia, where the 
National Government is supreme, and where there is 
neither State nor local authority to question the power 
of Congress. Efforts were made in the Senate to stop 
the annoyance of these ceaseless petitions, either by 
flatly refusing to receive them or by agreeing to lay 
them on the table as soon as received, and thus dispos- 
ing of them without committee reference or considera- 
tion in any other way. This was opposed on the 
ground that the right of petition is sacred, that it in- 
heres in every citizen by virtue of his citizenship, and 
that it is a right essential to republican self-government. 

Thus a new element was introduced into the slavery 
question. The opponents of slavery were enabled to 
take position as men defending one of the inherent and 
sacred rights of freemen, and in some degree to put the 
advocates of slavery and its apologists in the attitude 
of men denying that fundamental right. The battle 
raged long and fiercely in both Houses of Congress, 
with a consequent agitation among the people. 

As usual, Clay took what he regarded as the safe 
middle course. After his habit, he sought for grounds 
of compromise, in the hope that thus once more the 
disturbing spectre might be laid. He opposed the abo- 
lition of slavery in the District of Columbia without the 
previous consent of Virginia and Maryland, arguing 



158 Zbc Statesmen 

that such abolition would inflict a wrong and bring 

danger upon those States, which had ceded the District 
fo the nation. But he favored the continued reception 
of anti-slavery petitions, and opposed attempts then 
making to authorize postmasters to remove anti-slavery 
literature from the mails. 

In the election o\' [836 Clay was not a candidate, 
and Martin Van Buren, selected by Jackson to be his 
successor, was elected. Almost immediately after his 
accession there broke upon the country a financial panic 
such as had never been known before. It was in part 
the result of Jackson's dealing with the bank and in 
part due to other causes. The story of it does not 
concern the subject of the present essay, except that 
it prepared the way for a Whig victory in 1840. As is 
usual when financial stress and business prostration 
afflict the country, the people laid the blame upon the 
party in power, and clamorously demanded a change. 
The Whigs had no particular policy to offer as a remedy, 
but at any rate the Democrats, under whom the catas- 
trophe had come, must be ousted from their control of 
the government, and it required very little political 
foresight to discover that the Whigs would carry the 
country in 1840 by an overwhelming majority. In fact, 
their candidate received 2^4 electoral votes with only 
00 against him. But Clay was not their candidate. 
This was the one occasion on which they could easily 
and certainly have made him President. But they 
turned to another instead. They chose as their candi- 
date William Henry Harrison, as they had done in 1836. 



Ibenrp Clap 159 

He was a man possessed of no knowledge or experi- 
ence in public affairs, a man having in fact no qualifica- 
tions whatever for the high office he was chosen to fill. 
But he was a soldier, "a hero," and he had overthrown 
the power of the Indian chief Tecumseh. He lived 
plainly, like one of the people, and had never " put on 
airs." So the Whigs nominated him and went into 
the campaign with a positively insane enthusiasm. It 
was a campaign of catch-words, hero-worship, torch- 
light processions, and meaningless hurrahs. It repre- 
sented nothing of principle or policy, and its result 
could mean nothing except that the people were minded 
to dismiss one party from power and to install another 
in its stead, without stopping to ask what either of them 
represented or what either would do with power upon 
attaining to it. But this purely senseless campaign 
was extraordinarily successful. 

Harrison entered upon office apparently with only 
one well-defined purpose, namely, to put the very 
strongest men he could find into his Cabinet. He made 
Webster its chief, and asked Clay to accept a place, 
which he, however, declined. The clamorous office- 
seekers drove Harrison to his death within a month, 
and he was succeeded by the Vice-President, Tyler — 
the first Vice-President who had ever become President 
in that way. 

As we have seen, the Whigs had no definite policy. 
The party stood for nothing in particular, and it had 
nominated Tyler for Vice-President without inquiring 
what his political convictions might be. As the event 



160 Zbc Statesmen 

proved, he was for more a Democrat than anything 
else. He was a strict constructionist and an anti-bank 
man. Upon taking office he retained the Cabinet ap- 
pointed by Harrison, and for a time it was supposed 
that his administration would accord with the views 
and wishes of the great Whig leaders— Clay and Web- 
ster more especially. Chief among those wishes was 
that a new United States Bank should be chartered. 
Clay introduced a measure providing for that end and 
it was passed. Tyler vetoed it. Clay framed another 
bill in a form which he thought would meet the Presi- 
dent's objections, but Tyler vetoed that also. Indeed, 
he broke so completely with the party that had elected 
him that all the members of his Cabinet, except Web- 
ster, resigned their offices, and Webster remained 
against the clamorous protest of his party only in order to 
complete some negotiations of an exceedingly difficult 
and delicate nature, on the success of which depended 
the question of peace or war with England. When 
that work ended in the final ratification of the Ashbur- 
ton Treaty, he too relinquished his portfolio. 

Clay's anger at the vetoing of his bank bills, and the 
long succession of other vetoes that followed, was so 
great that he introduced and urged a constitutional 
amendment to restrict the veto power and make a mere 
majority vote of Congress sufficient to override it, and 
another to give Congress the power of appointing the 
Secretary of the Treasury and the United States Treas- 
urer. Fortunately Congress was less ready than Clay 
to meet temporary emergencies with permanent con- 



Ibcnq? Cla\> 161 

stitutional changes, and so these resolutions were 
never adopted. 

In 1842, after a session of an extremely arduous and 
trying character, Clay, who had declined a re-election, 
delivered an eloquent and touching farewell to the 
Senate, declaring it to be his fixed purpose never again 
to accept a seat in that body. 

But he by no means meant by this to withdraw 
from political life. On the contrary, his retirement from 
the Senate was but the beginning of the most deter- 
mined effort he had yet made to secure his election to 
the presidency. By withdrawing from active participa- 
tion in public affairs he freed himself from the necessity 
of antagonizing others, and from all responsibility for 
things done or advocated. He could appear before the 
country as one who. after long and patriotic public ser- 
vice, sought retirement and rest, leaving both his fame 
and the reward of his eminent services to his country- 
men. Instead of devoting himself to his law practice, 
and thus making that reparation in his personal for- 
tunes the necessity of which he had assigned as the 
chief reason of his retirement, he set out on a long 
series of " progresses," the manifest purpose of which 
was to arouse enthusiasm for him as a candidate for 
President in 1844. Everywhere he spoke eloquently 
and persuasively to great multitudes. Everywhere he 
was received with an enthusiasm which a king return- 
ing from glorious conquests might have envied. He 
had completely succeeded in breaking down Tyler's 
administration and driving the President into the 



162 Che Statesmen 

Democratic party, which had no great love for hin. 
and not the slightest purpose to nominate him as its 
candidate in 1S44. He had completely succeeded, 
also, in making himself, in the minds of the people, 
the recognized leader of the Whigs, the one man 
who could rally all that party's forces for the com- 
ing contest. He had entirely displaced his only- 
possible rival, Webster, and while he made his "pro- 
gresses," showing himself to the people and exercising 
all his wonderful gifts of persuasive oratory in winning 
them to his support, his friends were at work in the 
ways of "practical politics" in his behalf. One after 
another, state legislatures under Whig control, and 
state conventions of the Whig party put Clay in nomi- 
nation without waiting for the orderly' action of a 
"National Convention. 

As to issues, the situation presented but one em- 
barrassing difficulty. The bank question was so far 
given up by the Whigs that Clay could return to his 
old position, saying that while his views on that sub- 
ject had not changed, he had no desire to urge the 
establishment of a bank so long as there was no over- 
mastering popular demand for it, — a declaration which 
practically amounted to a final abandonment of the 
issue. As to the tariff, events had in effect disposed of 
that. The imperative need of revenue had compelled 
Congress in 1842, soon after Clay's retirement from the 
Senate, to abandon his compromise tariff of 1833, and 
continue duties that satisfied the protected manufac- 
turers. Finally, Clay's scheme of distributing the pro- 



Ibcnrp Clap 163 

ceeds of public land sales had been finally abandoned 
in obedience to Tyler's behest, expressed in his veto of 
successive tariff bills containing that provision, and his 
manifest determination to adhere to that refusal to the 
end. 

But there remained the question of the annexation 
of Texas, and a very dangerous question it was to 
a presidential aspirant. Tyler was moving heaven and 
earth to accomplish annexation, but neither party was 
as yet united either in behalf of the project or in oppo- 
sition to it. It was bitterly opposed at the North, be- 
cause it would involve an extension of slave territory. 
It was strongly supported at the South for that very 
reason. But both at the North and at the South there 
were large numbers of men in both parties who advo- 
cated, and other large numbers who opposed, annexa- 
tion, upon grounds quite apart from all questions of 
slavery. Manifestly, therefore, this was precisely one 
of those questions of which presidential candidates had 
every inducement to steer clear. If that could not be, 
as obviously it could not, safety for either candidate 
lay in keeping the issue out of the presidential election. 
Accordingly Van Buren, who was then regarded as 
almost certain of the Democratic nomination, visited 
Clay at his home at Ashland. The two had always 
been personally on the best of terms in spite of their 
political differences, and, as was reported at the time, 
they now agreed to keep the Texas question out of the 
campaign by both of them coming out in opposition 
to annexation. Whether such an agreement was made 



1 64 Gbe Statesmen 

or not, it was carried out. For when Tyler concluded 
a treaty of annexation, and was planning to have it 
ratified, Clay and Van Buren published simultaneous 
letters in their respective newspaper organs in opposi- 
tion to the scheme. This made it certain that in a 
contest between these two as rival candidates for the 
presidency, the question of Texan annexation could not 
be made an issue. 

But the fates overthrew all these calculations. Van 
Buren was not made the Democratic candidate. Al- 
though he had a majority of votes in the Democratic 
convention, the rule requiring a two-thirds' vote to 
make a nomination defeated him, and in the end the 
Democrats nominated James K. Polk, a representative 
of the extreme pro-slavery wing of his party, and an 
unflinching advocate of annexation. The convention 
also adopted annexation as a party policy. Thus 
Clay's activity in opposing annexation, so far from 
removing that question from the canvass, made it in 
fact the dominant issue. Clay made matters worse for 
himself by an unwise attempt to "hedge," as the 
gamblers say, on this question. Instead of standing 
firmly upon the ground he had taken in opposition to 
annexation, as likely to discredit the country and in- 
volve it in war, he wrote a second letter of an equivo- 
cating character, declaring that he did not personally 
object to annexation if it could be peaceably accom- 
plished. This was designed to placate Southern Whigs, 
who desired the acquisition of Texas in the interest of 
slavery, while retaining the favor of Northern Whigs 



1bcnr\? Clap 165 

who opposed annexation as a pro-slavery measure. 
The letter failed of both its purposes. It was too 
strongly in the pro-slavery interest to please the North- 
ern wing of the party, and not sufficiently pronounced 
in that way to satisfy the ardent annexationist Whigs 
of the South, who for safety's sake voted in large num- 
bers for Polk. 

Polk was elected, and again Clay's life-long ambi- 
tion to be President was baffled. He retired to Ashland 
and busied himself with efforts to rescue his private 
fortunes from embarrassments that seemed hopeless. 
He was deeply in debt, mainly by reason of his gen- 
erosity in assuming responsibility for others. At 
one time it seemed certain that he must lose even the 
home in which his entire married life had been spent, 
and in which his children had been born. But he was 
spared this calamity. Just when his affairs seemed 
most hopeless he was notified by a bank that persons, 
wholly unknown to the bank, had deposited to his 
credit a sum sufficient to discharge all his obligations 
and enable him to retain his home free of all debt. 
This was only one of the many proofs that came to 
him in those years of the profound affection in which 
he was held. 

During the next four years he accepted no public 
place, but he kept himself in touch with political affairs 
and managed more and more to emphasize his " claim " 
to be again his party's leader in the election of 1848. 
The "presidential fever" was still hot upon him ; the 
bee buzzed in his bonnet with unabated persistency. 



1 66 £be Statesmen 

He was unquestionably the ablest statesman among 
the Whigs, the one fittest to be President, the one who, 
by reason of his great gifts and extended experience, 
held the largest place in the popular mind. But the 
Whigs wanted to win in the election, and as the time 
of it approached they more and more doubted that they 
could win with Clay for their candidate. The annexa- 
tion of Texas, the war with Mexico, and the acquisition 
of all the vast California region had brought many 
perplexing questions into being, and had thrust the 
slavery question again into politics in very dangerous 
shape. If the Whig party had had any principles that 
it could call its own or any policy on which it could 
hope to unite, Henry Clay or Daniel Webster would 
have been beyond question its fittest candidate. Hav- 
ing none, and being hopelessly divided on every ques- 
tion at issue, and having in common no aspiration 
except to carry the election, it looked for a candidate 
whose nomination should mean nothing, but whose 
personal popularity might secure the necessary votes. 
It found such a candidate in Zachary Taylor. He had 
never voted in his life or in any other way indicated 
what his politics might be. He had never had the 
smallest experience in civil affairs, and presumably had 
no capacity in that direction. He was a Southern man 
and a slaveholder, but the Northern anti-slavery Whigs 
were ready to overlook that for the sake of the victory 
they hoped to achieve with him as their candidate. He 
was deservedly a popular " hero," because of his really 
extraordinary military achievements in Mexico. He 



Ibenrp Cla\> 167 

had much the same kind of strength that had made 
Jackson and Harrison successful in elections. He was 
nominated without any platform whatever or any dec- 
laration in any other form of what his candidacy meant. 
He regarded himself, indeed, less as a party candidate 
than as a man chosen by the people and accepted by 
the Whig convention. He had declared in writing, be- 
fore the convention met, that he would be a candidate 
whether the party nominated him or not, and while the 
campaign was in progress he formally accepted a nomi- 
nation tendered by a Democratic caucus in South 
Carolina. 

Clay was wounded to the quick when this merely 
military man was preferred to him. He was profoundly 
disgusted, too, by the nomination of one so unfit for 
the office to which he aspired. Webster called it "a 
nomination unfit to be made," and, after long hesita- 
tion, supported Taylor only as a choice of evils. Clay 
went farther, and refused to support the candidate at 
all or to take any interest in the campaign. 

The time was now near at hand when Clay was to 
render his last and greatest service to the advocates of 
slavery extension. Yet he still clung to his desire to 
see slavery abolished, and in 184Q, when a convention 
to revise the constitution of Kentucky was to be 
elected, he took up the parable of his young manhood, 
and again urged, at the age of seventy-two, that scheme 
of gradual emancipation which he had advocated half 
a century before. 

In December, 1840, Clay again took his seat in the 



i6S Zbc Statesmen 

Senate as the unanimous choice of the Kentucky Legis- 
lature, and in the Senate he straightway claimed and 
was accorded his old position as undisputed leader of 
the majority. The political situation was the most 
difficult one that the country had ever confronted. 
The slavery question had come forward in a more 
threatening form than it had ever before assumed, and 
the country was inflamed concerning it in an unpre- 
cedented degree. Texas had been admitted as a slave 
State, with the understanding that her vast territory 
was presently to be carved into four States, thus adding 
eight Southerners to the Senate. The Mexican War 
had added California, New Mexico, and Utah to our 
national domain, and, by reason of the gold discoveries, 
California had rapidly become populous. The people 
of that Territory, without waiting for an enabling act, 
had framed a constitution and asked admission into the 
Union as a free State. To this the South objected, 
and various propositions were brought forward by way 
of settlement. One of these was to extend the Mis- 
souri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean. This 
would have divided California into two States. Texas 
was claiming most of New Mexico, and the slave- 
holders of Texas insisted upon their right to take their 
slave property into that region. A great congressional 
battle had been fought over what was called "the 
Wilmot Proviso " — a proviso which had been inserted 
into an appropriation bill, forever forbidding slavery 
in the Territories acquired from Mexico. The pro- 
viso had been rejected, but its discussion had greatly 



1bcnr\> Clap 169 

inflamed men's minds, North and South, and intensi- 
fied the excitement over the slavery question. The 
South complained not only that efforts were making to 
deny to Southerners their equal rights in the Territories, 
but that Northern States interfered with the laws for 
the rendition of fugitive slaves, and that the agitation 
in favor of abolishing slavery in the District of Colum- 
bia was an injury and a menace to all the slave States. ' 
Thus, when Clay returned to the Senate he found the 
country seemingly on the very edge of disruption and 
civil war, with no apparent prospect, in the temper 
then existing, of finding any way of escape. Again 
he assumed the role of pacificator, and set himself to 
solve the problem. Without any question his efforts 
were inspired solely by his overmastering concern for 
the Union. To preserve the Republic from disintegra- 
tion he was ready to yield anything and everything of 
conviction or of policy, and in that behalf he was 
prepared to exercise all his powers of persuasion in 
inducing others to accept his plan of compromise. 

That plan proposed that California should be ad- 
mitted as a free State ; that territorial governments 
should be established in Mew Mexico and Utah, with- 
out any restriction as to slavery ; that the boundary of 
Texas should be drawn as it now is, the general Gov- 
ernment undertaking to satisfy Texas for the loss of 
territory claimed by that State ; that an act should be 
passed by Congress solemnly promising that slavery 
should never be abolished in the District of Columbia 
without the consent of Maryland ; that the slave trade, 



i/o Hbc Statesmen 

however, should be forbidden in the District ; and, 
finally, that a new and effective fugitive slave law 
should be enacted and enforced with all the power of 
the Federal Government. As chairman of a special 
committee. Clay embodied these propositions in bills, 
and after a long struggle they were enacted. 

This, in substance, was the famous " Compromise of 
iSso." It satisfied nobody, though for the time being 
it seemed to have averted danger to the Union. So 
widespread was the dissatisfaction, however, and so 
difficult was it to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law in 
many of the Northern States — in brief, so truly " irre- 
pressible " was the conflict of opinion, sentiment, and 
material interests with respect to slavery that Clay 
advocated the creation of special powers vested in the 
President, to enable him to enforce the compromise. 
He also issued a sort of proclamation, signed by himself 
and forty-three other Senators and Representatives, de- 
claring their purpose to oppose, for any office, great or 
small, any man not openly favoring the strictest adhe- 
rence to the terms of the compromise, as a safeguard to 
the Union. 

Thus, in [851, Clay looked forward to his final retire- 
ment from public life at the end of his term, in the firm 
belief that he had at last succeeded in settling the 
slavery question, eliminating it from politics, and for- 
ever securing the Union against disruption upon that 
exasperating issue. It was only ten years later that the 
battle of Manassas was fought within cannon-sound of 
Washington. 



Ibcnrp Clap 



'7' 



Clay was, in i8si, in his seventy-fifth year, and his 
health was so greatly impaired that he appeared only 
once in his senatorial seat during the session of 1851- 
52. His work in the world was done, and on June 29, 
1852, he died, honored and deeply mourned by his 
countrymen. 

Few men in our history have played so large a part 
in American affairs of state, and few h;ive been inspired, 
in the main, by a purer patriotism than his. 




THE JURISTS 



JOHN MARSHALL 

JOHN MARSHALL, as Chief Justice of the United 
States during the formative period of the coun- 
try's history, did more than any other man at 
any period ever did to determine what sort of govern- 
ment this Republic should have and what its destiny 
among nations should be. For more than a third of a 
century he presided over the Supreme Court, and in all 
important cases dominated and directed the opinions 
of that august tribunal. 

The framers of the Constitution had prepared a 
written document for the government of the Republic, 
—a document which might mean one thing or another, 
according to its interpretation. John Marshall decided 
by his interpretations of it what it should mean and 
what it should enforce. Practically all of the great con- 
stitutional questions that have arisen in the nation's 
history came before him for decision, and in deciding 
them he did more even than the members of the Con- 
stitution-framing Convention themselves to determine 
under what system of fundamental law the affairs of 
the Republic should be conducted. They framed an 



1 76 £bc 3iui6ts 

organic law. He decided what that organic law 
meant. 

Chief among his achievements in this direction was 
his successful insistence upon the right of the Supreme 
Court to override and nullify any act of Congress 
which it might find to be in contravention of the Con- 
stitution, or without warrant from the fundamental 
law. This point was gravely disputed. It was in- 
sisted that Congress itself should be the only judge of 
its own right to legislate — a doctrine which would 
have made the legislative power as completely inde- 
pendent of restraint as it is in England, and would 
have rendered the Constitution so much waste paper 
as a fundamental law designed to restrain and regulate 
the conduct of Congress. 

When that question was brought before John Mar- 
shall he decided it once and forever in behalf of the 
Constitution and against the claims of Congress. In 
effect his decision in Marbury vs. Madison was that 
Congress is the creature of the Constitution, not its 
master ; that so long as its legislation is such as the 
Constitution authorizes, it is valid, and the courts are 
bound to enforce it ; but that wherever it transgresses 
the Constitution or transcends the authority granted 
to Congress by that document, the courts must hold 
its acts to be null and void, and not legislation at all. 
His reasoning on this supremely important point is 
best presented in his own absolutely conclusive words: 

" It is a proposition too plain to be contested, that the Consti- 
tution controls any legislative act repugnant to it, or (else) that the 



John Marshall 

>„, the painting by Henry tnr 






3obn flDarsball 177 

legislature may alter the Constitution by an ordinary act. Between 
these alternatives there is no middle ground. The Constitution 
is either a superior, paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary 
measures, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, and, like 
other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it. 
If the former part of the alternative be true, then a legislative act 
contrary to the Constitution is not law ; if the latter part be true, 
then written constitutions are absurd attempts on the part of the 
people to limit a power in its own nature illimitable." 

If Chief Justice Marshall had done nothing else in 
all his life than deliver this one decision his service to 
the country would have been of inestimable value. 
For by this decision he once and forever gave force and 
effect to the great purpose of the constitution-makers 
to establish the judiciary as a co-ordinate branch of the 
government, equal to and wholly independent of the 
legislative and executive branches. It is under this 
decision, and by virtue of it alone, that a check-rein 
has ever since been held upon the will of Congress ; 
and he must be an inattentive student of history who 
does not recall countless instances in which the sub- 
jection of Congress to the Constitution, under penalty 
of the annulment of its lawless acts, has been a con- 
dition of salvation to the dearest interests of the nation 
and its people. 

John Marshall was born in Fauquier County, Vir- 
ginia, September 24, 1755. He was irregularly but 
thoroughly educated. His father trained him from 
early childhood in +he classic English literature. In 
boyhood he attended a school for a single year. After 
that he was trained by private tutors alone, never 
attending any other school or any college. At the age 



178 Ebe 3urists 

of eighteen he began the study of law, and a little 
later, the Revolution having broken out, he entered 
the military service of his country, in which he suf- 
ficiently distinguished himself to attain the rank of 
captain in the line. 

After six years of nearly continuous service, the 
war having in effect come to an end, Marshall 
devoted himself to the study and practice of the law, 
a career in which he quickly rose to distinction, 
chiefly by reason of his extraordinary power of so 
lucidly stating a principle or a succession of facts that 
not even the dullest intelligence could fail to grasp 
and comprehend his meaning and the body of reason- 
ing upon which it rested. It is related of the late 
Judah P. Benjamin that, on his first appearance in the 
Supreme Court of the United States, he had to answer 
the eloquent speech of a truly Ciceronian orator. In 
his reply, Benjamin indulged in no rhetoric, constructed 
no periods, in short, did nothing for effect. Instead, he 
presented the case of his client in so simple, lucid, and 
convincing a way that the then Chief Justice, turning 
to Justice Campbell, said : 

"That little fellow has stated his adversary clear 
out of court." 

Something like this was said of John Marshall by 
his contemporaries. It was said by one of the greatest 
of them that "when Marshall makes a law point he 
does it so simply that the most uneducated farmer in 
court understands it as completely as the ablest lawyer 
does." 



3obn flDareball 179 

Yet not for a long- time, and not until he was made 
Chief Justice, did this man of eminently judicial mind 
hold any judicial office. He was from time to time 
elected to a seat in the Virginia Legislature. In 17S8 
he was made a member of the Virginia Convention, 
called to consider the acceptance or rejection of the 
new Federal Constitution. He was a strong advo- 
cate of acceptance, and it was chiefly by reason of his 
eloquence in answer to Patrick Henry that Virginia 
finally ratified the Constitution and made the Union 
a practical possibility. For had Virginia withheld her 
assent, her commanding position would undoubtedly 
have brought the whole project to naught. Yet with 
all of Marshall's persuasive logic and James Madison's 
impressive influence, the Virginia Convention gave a 
majority of only ten in a total vote of 168 in favor 
of accepting the new Federal Constitution. Very 
certainly the majority would have been on the other 
side if John Marshall had not won the convention to 
his views by his masterly presentation of the coun- 
try's needs, especially in the matters of taxation, the 
control of the militia, and the establishment of that 
supreme judicial power which, all unknown to him- 
self at the time, he was destined to exercise for so 
long a time and with such beneficent consequences 
to the country. 

When the Constitution was ratified and the National 
Government organized, with Washington for President, 
the first cleavage leading to the formation of parties 
appeared. Washington, Hamilton, John Adams, and 



i so £be 3urtets 

other strong leaders of men believed strenuously in 
the necessity of adequate strength in the National Gov- 
ernment, and were disposed to interpret the Constitu- 
tion with that end in view. Jefferson and his followers 
profoundly distrusted this policy, fearing that the Fed- 
eral Government might become too strong for the 
States and impair their independence. The cleavage 
was not yet so well defined as to prevent united action 
in behalf of the public welfare by the leaders of the 
two sides. Both Jefferson and Hamilton — the fore- 
most representatives respectively of the Republican 
and Federalist parties — were members of Washing- 
ton's Cabinet, and to the end of his days Washing- 
ton's chief concern in statecraft was to avert what he 
deemed the danger to the Republic that lay in the 
arousing of party spirit. 

In all these early controversies John Marshall leant 
strongly to the side of Washington and Hamilton. 
He wanted a government strong enough to stand alone, 
and he had no fear that such a government, restrained 
at every point by a written constitution, would become 
dangerous to liberty. In the controversies of that time 
his great influence, his extraordinary legal learning, 
and his still more wonderful capacity for lucid state- 
ment and convincing exposition, were constantly called 
into activity in defence of Washington's policies and 
of those views of the Constitution upon which such 
policies were based. 

In 170- Washington offered Marshall the place of 
Attorney-General of the United States, and Marshall 



3obn flDarsball 181 

declined it. In 1796 Washington wanted to make him 
Minister to France, a country with which our relations 
were then severely strained. Again Marshall declined 
the appointment. In 1797 President Adams appointed 
Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry joint Ministers to 
France, and, seeing now an opportunity to serve his 
country, Marshall accepted. 

The corruption of the French republican govern- 
ment at that time was almost incredible. Talleyrand, 
its head, boldly demanded of the American Ministers a 
money bribe as the condition of re-establishing diplo- 
matic relations between France and the United States. 

The Ministers indignantly rejected the infamous 
proposal, and Marshall prepared a State paper of extra- 
ordinary force and vigor which the Ministers sent to 
Talleyrand, and in which they set forth clearly this 
country's earnest desire to be at peace and to re-estab- 
lish friendly relations with France, at the same time 
emphasizing their determination never to buy such 
terms of amity by the payment of any sort of tribute. 
It was in celebration of this affair that at a Philadelphia 
dinner, given to Marshall on his return, the toast was 
proposed, "Millions for defence; not one cent for 
tribute." 

Marshall and Pinckney, Federalists, were instantly 
ordered by Talleyrand to quit France, as Pinckney 
had been once before. Gerry, being a Republican, was 
permitted to remain, but not in a position that prom- 
ised the achievement of anything of value to the 
country. 



1S2 £bc 3uri5t6 

Concerning this matter President John Adams wrote 
to the Secretary of State : 

" Of the three envoys the conduct of Marshall alone has been en- 
tirely satisfactory and ought to be marked by the most decided 
approbation of the public. He has raised the American people 
in their own esteem, and if the influence of truth and justice. 
reason and argument, is not lost in Europe, he has raised the consid- 
eration of the United States in that quarter of the world." 

In pursuit of his purpose thus to signalize Marshall's 
service by public recognition. President Adams offered 
to the great Virginian a seat upon the bench o( 
the Supreme Court. Again Marshall declined the 
honor. 

In 1700 Marshall reluctantly accepted an election to 
Congress, where he served but for a single term. But 
during that term he served the government in a wax- 
productive of lasting benefits. In connection with 
an extradition case, the details of which need not be 
related here, resolutions, bitterly censuring the Admin- 
istration and a Federal judge in South Carolina, were 
introduced into Congress, and the obvious impulse of 
Congress was to adopt them. John Marshall came to 
the rescue. In a speech o\ extraordinary force and 
persuasiveness, he showed that the course of the 
Administration and the Federal court had been sound 
in law, right in morals, and should be made a prece- 
dent to govern all future proceedings in extradition. 
So lucidly did he present his argument, and so elo- 
quently did he plead for the right, that Congress aban- 
doned its purpose of censure and decidedly rejected 



3obn HDarsball 183 

the resolutions of condemnation. Thus was the Ad- 
ministration served at the moment, but that was the 
very smallest part of the matter. For thus did John 
Marshall establish a principle and a precedent which 
have ever since governed and determined our nation's 
dealings with similar cases. 

It was by a series of happy accidents that the coun- 
try, in its formative period, secured the inestimable 
advantage of John Marshall's appointment to the 
Chief-Justiceship, and, by consequence of it, all those 
wonderfully wise decisions that have given form and 
consistency to the National Constitution. Adams took 
him out of Congress and made him Secretary of State. 
A little later there occurred a vacancy in the Chief-Jus- 
ticeship. Adams offered the place to John Jay, who 
declined it. Adams had failed of re-election, and his 
term was drawing to a close. Jefferson was to succeed 
him, and it is pretty safe to assume that Jefferson, the 
supreme leader of the Republicans, would never have 
appointed the stalwart Federalist, John Marshall, to be 
Chief Justice and chief interpreter of the Constitution. 
Nor did Marshall himself anticipate anything of the 
kind. On the contrary, as Secretary of State, he busied 
himself to find a proper person for the supremely im- 
portant place of Chief Justice, in order that the ap- 
pointment might be made by Adams before the 
inauguration of Jeffeison. One of his biographers tells 
a pleasant story of the way in which Adams announced 
to Marshall his purpose of appointing him to the 
most exalted judicial place in the land. Marshall, as 



1 84 £be 3iirtet9 

Secretary of State, suggested the name of a man whom 
he thought fit for the appointment. President Adams 
replied : 

" General Marshall, you need not give yourself any 
further trouble about that matter. 1 have made up my 
mind about it." "I am happy to hear," answered 
Marshall, "that you are relieved on the subject. May 
I ask whom you have fixed upon?" "1 have con- 
cluded," said Adams, "to nominate a person whom it 
may surprise you to hear mentioned. He is a Virginia 
lawyer, a plain man, by the name of John Marshall." 

Thus by a happy succession of accidents was John 
Adams enabled to crown his expiring Administration by 
giving to the country the greatest Chief Justice it has 
ever had, at the precise time when the wisdom and 
learning of such a man had their best opportunity to 
impress themselves upon our half-formed institutions 
in that wonderful series of judicial decisions which set- 
tled the Constitution and determined for all time what 
it should mean. Nothing more fortunate has ever hap- 
pened to the Republic than the appointment of John 
Marshall at that precise moment of time. 

Chief Justice Marshall wrote a Life of IVjshiiiii- 
ton, but his enduring monument must always be the 
Supreme Court reports that embody those decisions of 
his, during his thirty-five years of service, which 
moulded the Republic into its existing form, and did 
much to give it permanence as a power of commanding 
import in the world. 

Marshall died in 1835, at the ripe age of eighty 



3obn flDarsball 



185 



years, and his activity of mind had continued unim- 
paired to the last. In virility of reasoning, in aptness 
of illustration, in vigorous grasp of the principles of law, 
his very last decisions were tit fellows for those that he 
had rendered in the prime of his manhood. 




\ Ad*i*>;, : aX& ; ;«& -C 



■■ >*- 






v-~^- •^■-— /*^> •"'»"■•>' •--^ir-^V'-V 



JOSEPH STORY 

IT is related upon good authority that when Joseph 
Story's masterly work on the Conflict of Laws 
appeared, the Lord Chancellor of England sent 
his judicial wig to the American jurist, with an inscrip- 
tion in it which read: "From a Lord Chancellor to 
one who deserves to be." 

The anecdote aptly illustrates the regard in which 
Story was held in England and on the continent oi 
Europe as an expounder of the more difficult principles 
of the law. It was everywhere recognized that Joseph 
Story shared with John Marshall. Lord Mansfield. Lord 
Eldon. Lord Ellenborough. and a few others of the elect, 
the honor of supreme masterfulness in the comprehen- 
sion and application of those fundamental principles of 
law which have been justly called the sum and ultimate 
outcome of human reason. 

Among American jurists. Story had but one peer as 
a profound and sagacious interpreter oi the law — and 
that one peer was no less a master than John Marshall. 

From his boyhood to the end oi his days, Joseph 
Story was a voracious seeker of knowledge for its own 



Joseph Story 

From an etching by Max Rosenthal 



3osepb 5 ton? 187 

sake. He brought to bear upon all his studies not only 
the eagerness of acquisition which marks the "honor 
man" of the schools, but also, and much better, the 
scientific attitude of mind. He hungered and thirsted 
for truth, whatever the truth might be. He permitted 
no prejudice or preconception to embarrass discovery 
or to forbid any conclusion. He studied the funda- 
mental principles of the law in the same spirit in which 
the biologist investigates the bases of organic being, or 
the chemist observes reactions and notes precipitations, 
and, in like scientific spirit, he applied the teachings of 
his studies to the work of drawing conclusions. He 
applied broad principles to individual questions pre- 
cisely as the scientific investigator applies his knowl- 
edge of general facts to the particular purpose of a 
laboratory experiment. If this thought is made clear 
to the reader's mind, he will understand Joseph Story 
and appreciate the great work that he did in the world. 
He will understand also how and why it is that Story's 
law books have been translated into many languages, 
and through three generations have been quoted as final 
and conclusive authorities in every civilized country 
of the world. 

Story was born on the 1 8th of September, 177Q, in 
Marblehead, Massachusetts. He was the son of a 
doctor, from whom he inherited his instinct of intellec- 
tual activity and that love of truth for its own sake 
which constituted his scientific habit of mind. Gradu- 
ating from Harvard in 179S, he studied law, and was 
admitted to the bar in 1801. His strongly literary 



1 88 Zbc 3urists 

instincts led him presently to publish a volume of poems, 
of which he was afterwards, quite needlessly, ashamed. 
At the same time he began writing and publishing law- 
books, which the attorneys and counsellors of his 
time sadly needed for their instruction. 

All this while he was tirelessly prosecuting his 
studies of the old black-letter laws of England, and 
giving such attention to his practice that he speedily 
rose to a foremost place among the Massachusetts 
lawyers of the time. 

In politics he favored Jefferson's views in the main, 
though his reverence for Washington, Adams, and 
especially Marshall, put a check upon all tendencies of 
his mind to extreme partisanship, whether personally 
or as a member of the Massachusetts Legislature, in 
which he served several terms at this time, or later as 
a Representative in Congress, to which body he was 
elected in 1808. 

In 181 1, although he was only thirty-two years of 
age, he was appointed one of the Justices of the 
Supreme Court of the United States, an office which 
he continued to hold until the time of his death, in 
1845. On several occasions he acted as Chief Justice, 
and he was always regarded in the court as chief among 
those below the Chief-Justiceship. 

It is not easy for the lawyers of this modern time to 
understand the perplexities of law which Story, sitting 
on circuit, had to deal with. His courts were located 
in New England, where commerce presented all its 
problems of admiralty jurisdiction, of marine insurance, 



3osepb Storp 189 

of prize-law, of salvage, of flotsam and jetsam, of aban- 
donments and rescues, and all the rest of it. All these 
questions are now completely covered by statutes, de- 
cisions, and well-settled precedents. When Story had 
to deal with them they presented all manner of prob- 
lems which there were no statutes to solve, concerning 
which there were no decisions to be cited in support of 
one view or another, no precedents to be invoked. He 
had only the general principles of law to guide him, 
and it is a fact worthy of interested note, that scarcely 
one of the decisions that he rendered on the strength 
of his learning in the fundamental principles of law was 
afterwards overthrown by the Supreme Court, sitting in 
banc. 

When the century was in its teens, the African 
slave trade, in spite of its legal prohibition since 1808, 
was still carried on, mainly in ships sailing out of New 
England ports, and with the financial support of New 
England capital. Against this nefarious traffic, Mr. 
Justice Story sternly set his face. His charges to Fed- 
eral grand juries, urging upon them the duty of indict- 
ing all the highly moral and respectable gentlemen of 
New England who were directly or indirectly engaged 
in the slave trade, brought down upon him the most 
violent vituperations of the press. He was assailed as 
a judge who deserved to be hurled from the bench- 
simply because, in his judicial capacity, he was endeav- 
oring to secure the enforcement of the humane laws of 
the land, against those who, greedy of gain, were en- 
gaged in an inhuman traffic in plain violation of the 



i go £be 3urists 

" statutes in that case made and provided." But Joseph 
Story was a man of courage as well as of upright mind. 
He faltered not, nor tailed. He did his duty and dared 
the consequences. In the face of such angry denuncia- 
tion as might well have appalled a man of less exalted 
character, he persisted in urging this matter upon grand 
juries, and when a case involving the slave trade came 
before him for adjudication, he unhesitatingly and very 
eloquently denounced the traffic in slaves from Africa as 
inhuman, abhorrent to all enlightened minds, a plain, un- 
disputed, and indisputable transgression of the national 
statutes, and a flagrant violation of the laws of nations. 
It was a very daring thing to do. There were vast 
"vested interests" involved. There were New England 
ships that found a greater profit in the illegal and in- 
human slave trade than in any other carrying. There 
were negroes to be had in plenty, and at a trifling cost, 
on the west coast of Africa. There was a profitable 
market for them in the South, where the cotton-gin 
invention of Eli Whitney had made slave labor enor- 
mously profitable. What business had this sentimen- 
tal Justice of the Supreme Court to interfere with a 
traffic which gave employment to all the ships that 
New England carpenters could build, and paid exces- 
sive interest on all the money that New England wealth 
and thrift could invest in the traffic ? That question 
bristled in the press, asserted itself in the market- 
place, and met no resolute answer even in the pulpit. 
Only in the court, only at the hands of the scholarly 
Justice Story did the traffic meet the decree, "Thou 



3o9cpb Storp 191 

shalt not," and that decree Story pronounced with a 
calmly resolute mind that took no account either of 
"vested interest" in evil, or of the "power of the 
press," perverted to the subservient advocacy of crime. 

Joseph Story's tame rests upon quite other founda- 
tions than this. But if it had no other corner-stone 
this might well serve as a sufficient support. 

Following a custom, which has now fallen into 
perhaps deserved disuse, Story, while remaining a Su- 
preme Court Justice, became, in 1829, a professor of 
law in Harvard College, where he in effect created a 
law school that is now one of the largest and most in- 
fluential in the country. There had been but one 
student in that department during the year preceding 
his incumbency. Under his direction the school 
quickly became populous with eager students of the 
law. He was active in other departments of endeavor 
also, but his chief work, and that upon which his fame 
securely rests, was his masterful interpretation of the 
law in a series of text-books that are still unsurpassed, 
in their learning, their lucidity, and their limpidness of 
expression, by any of the writings that grace the litera- 
ture of the law. His writings are fundamental to every 
student's work. They are of recognized authority in 
every court in Christendom, and wherever Law is held 
in honor, and Justice speaks with a clear voice, there 
the name of Joseph Story is spoken as that of one 
of the chief prophets of enlightened jurisprudence. 
His honored and most useful life came to an end on 
the 10th of September, 1845. 



JAMES KENT 

CHANCELLOR JAMES KENT never held any 
office under the Federal Government. On 
the only occasion on which he was a can- 
didate for Congress, he was defeated. He had no gift 
of moving eloquence. As a lawyer at the bar, his name 
was never identified with any of the great causes 
that have become famous as determinative of impor- 
tant points in Constitutional interpretation. In brief, 
lie had absolutely none of the adventitious aids to 
celebrity that play so large a part in the life-histories 
of most distinguished men. Yet there is not a lawyer 
in all this land, and not a man acquainted with the 
history of legal development among us, who does not 
regard Judge Kent's selection for a place in the Hall of 
Fame by the side o\ Marshall and Story as one emi- 
nently fit to be made. 

He was a man of extraordinary learning in the law, 
and he devoted much o\ his energy to the task o\ 
making his learning practically available for the uses of 
others and for the enlightenment of the courts them- 
selves. He was the author of one of the most learned, 
192 






James Kent 

by I''. K. Spencer 



3amc9 Ikent 193 

most intelligent, and most useful treatises upon the 
principles of law in their application to the administra- 
tion of justice which has ever been published in the 
English language. His Commentaries on American 
Law very justly gave him a place in the company 
of Justinian, Grotius, Vattel, Coke, Blackstone, and 
Story, as one of the great law-writers of the world. 

He was born in Putnam County, N. Y., on July 31, 
1763. At Yale College he received the very meagre 
education which at that time was all that any college 
could give — an education less comprehensive, less 
thorough, and immeasurably less sensible than that 
which the ordinary High Schools of our day give to 
their pupils. But at least young Kent had learned at 
Yale his need of learning vastly more than Yale could 
teach, and he set himself at once to the task of repair- 
ing the deficiency in his education by a course of 
self-imposed study. With a courageous industry, the 
simple record of which seems appalling, he gave four 
hours before breakfast each morning to the study of 
Latin and Greek, and two hours after supper each 
evening to French literature, after which he devoted 
his evenings to the reading of English standard authors. 
His days, in their regular working hours, were given up 
to the diligent study of the law. Something like this 
was continued as his daily habit throughout a life 
which extended over eighty-four years. 

His reputation for learning in the law grew rapidly, 
and when he removed to New York, at the age of little 
more than thirty years, he was made Professor of Law 



194 Gbc 3urists 

in Columbia College. He then took up an exhaustive 
study of the Roman civil law, and its development in 
France and the other Latin countries of Europe. He 
also made at that time those studies of the United 
States Constitution which afterwards formed the basis 
of his Commentaries. Meanwhile, he served several 
terms in the State Legislature, and in 1797 became 
Recorder of the City of New York. 

During the next year he became a J ustice of the State 
Supreme Court, and in 1S04 Chief Justice of that tribu- 
nal. For ten years thereafter he devoted himself to the 
better ordering of Supreme Court practice, to the deter- 
mination of unsettled principles of law, to the reform of 
judicial proceedings, and to the development of a sys- 
tem of commercial law— founded upon the accepted 
principles of all law, but adapted to the new conditions 
of American trade and industry. His service in these 
directions, as every educated lawyer knows, was of in- 
estimable value, and his expository decisions of that 
time, as they are recorded in the reports, are freely cited 
nearly a century later as the very highest authorities 
on the questions of law with which they are concerned. 

In 1814, Kent was made Chancellor of New York, 
and in that capacity he restored equity jurisprudence 
to its ancient efficiency as the guardian of imperilled 
rights, and the helpful handmaiden of the sometimes 
erring law. 

On his retirement for age in 1821, Kent returned to 
New York City and resumed his professorship of law in 
Columbia University. It was then that he put forth, at 



3ames Ikcnt 



195 



first in the form of class-room lectures, his Commen- 
taries on American Law, which, frequently revised by 
himself, and, since his death, by others, has remained 
until now as an indispensable, fundamental text-book 
basis of the earnest law-student's study. It is upon 
that work that Chancellor Kent's fame rests, and the 
foundation is adequate and secure. 

He was always active in aid of others, and especially 
in aid of all that tended to the popular enlightenment. 
He lived in conspicuous honor, and died at the advanced 
age of eighty-four, on December \2, 1847. 




THE MEN OF THE CIVIL WAR 







ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

IN some respects, at least, the history of Abraham 
Lincoln is more remarkable than that of any other 
of the men who have achieved greatness in face 
of difficulties in this wonderful country of ours. Other 
men have been born poor, and have reached high dis- 
tinction without opportunity of education except such 
as they provided for themselves. But no other man 
who has attained great distinction was so unfortunately 
born as Lincoln was, and no other man, with the sin- 
gle exception of Washington, has achieved a fame so 
great as his. 

He was born not only in poverty, but in squalor. He 
was born not only without prospects, but seemingly 
without hope. He was the son of a Southern poor 
white— a class from whose eyes even visionary hope of 
betterment was shut out by their own lack of thrift, 
their chronic indolence, their utter and unconquerable 
lack of that divine discontent which breeds aspiration. 
Lincoln's father belonged to that class of semi- 
nomadic creatures who passed their lives mainly in re- 
moving from one piece of ill-cultivated land to another, 



200 Zbc flDcn of the Civil Mar 

on which their indolence was destined to let the weeds 
grow with unabated neglect. 

As if to make matters worse for the young Lincoln, 
his father removed while he was yet a little child from 
Hardin County, Kentucky, to the unsettled regions of 
Indiana, and thence afterwards to various points in 
Illinois. In all that country there were, properly speak- 
ing, no opportunities open to the lad to acquire an 
education. There were so-called schools, open perhaps 
during three months in the year, in which men, them- 
selves ignorant, taught the little that they knew to un- 
willing pupils, thrashing into them the rudiments of 
reading, writing, and arithmetic. Beyond this, there 
were no educational opportunities whatever, and even 
these meagre chances for instruction were often denied 
to the young Lincoln by reason of his father's frequent 
removals. Nevertheless, the boy secured possession of 
that talisman, the ability to read — the master-key al- 
ways and everywhere to learning of every kind. He 
voraciously read the few books upon which he could in 
any wise lay his hands, and they fed a mind that proved 
itself well worthy of the nourishment. He had mechan- 
ical ability, and with it he taught himself to write that 
excellently legible hand with which the world is now 
familiar. His great simplicity of character, his instinc- 
tive directness of thought, his absolute honesty of 
mind, and the earnestness of his purpose to make him- 
self understood, taught him that extraordinary clearness 
of literary style which in later years enabled him to 
give to the world his celebrated Gettysburg speech— an 



Abraham Lincoln 

rawing frum life by 1 ■". B. 



Hbrabam Xincoln 201 

utterance unexcelled in its perfection by any words 
that human lips have spoken. 

It has been conjectured by some of Lincoln's biog- 
raphers that the exceeding terseness, compactness, and 
simplicity of his literary style were the results of the fact 
that when he wrote "compositions" in his youth he 
was forced to clip short his sentences, and to reject every 
unnecessary word in order to save paper, which was 
then an expensive thing. Possibly this compulsory 
training in terseness may somewhat have helped in the 
development of Lincoln's style ; but it seems almost 
absurd to attribute so great an effect to so insignificant a 
cause. It seems more reasonable to find the causes of 
Lincoln's truly wonderful clearness of utterance in the 
character of the man, in the inborn sincerity of his mind, 
and in the earnestness with which he sought always, 
in writing or in speech, to make clear and unmistakable 
to others the thought that was in him. "The style is 
the man," it has been said, and in Lincoln's case at 
least the literary style perfectly accorded in its sincerity, 
simplicity, and directness, with the like qualities in the 
character of the man. The Gettysburg speech and that 
splendid burst of eloquence, so often quoted from the 
second inaugural address, in which occur the words, 
"With malice toward none, with charity for all," were 
very certainly not the results of any paper-saving rhe- 
torical drill, but the spontaneous utterances of a great, 
simple, and sincere mind. 

Lincoln's intellect seems always to have been acute, 
but it was slow in development, and the history of his 



2oa Zbc flDcn of tbc Civil TKHar 

youth and his young manhood does not indicate the 
existence of any particular ambition or high hope in 
him. He was content to do farm labor, rail-splitting, 
flat boating, and even that most inconsequent of all 
labors, the work of a clerk in a country store. During 
many years, his ambition seems not at all to have been 
awakened. He thought of himself, apparently, merely 
as a young man who must somehow— it didn't much 
matter to him how — manage to put bread and butter 
into his own mouth. He seems to have looked forward 
to no future better than his meagre present. It seems 
not to have occurred to him in all the earlier years of 
his life that he had a mind worth cultivating, a charac- 
ter worth developing, or a future worth striving for. 
He read voluminously, it is true, so far as he could 
borrow books, but he read apparently for his own 
gratification alone, and not at all with any view to 
future possibilities. He was inspired by no ambition 
and stirred to action by no hope. He was alternately 
busy and indolent — busy when he had a job to do, 
and indolent when it was done. 

Here, perhaps, we discover the results of heredity. 
The mood of mind in which Lincoln passed his earlier 
years was not unlike that ot his forbears, the "poor 
whites," to whom dinner meant the end o( the day, 
and to whom there was no morrow in prospect. 

It was very slowly that Lincoln worked himself out 
of this condition of inherited indolence— this disposition 
to rest content with things as they were, to sit satisfiedly 
in the sun or in the shade, as the temperature might 



Hbrabam TLincoln 203 

suggest, and to leave the future to take care of itself. 
No intelligent student of the various biographies that 
have been written of this extraordinary man can fail to 
observe this tendency of his mind during the years of 
his earlier manhood, and perhaps there is nothing in his 
history which redounds more to his credit than the fact 
that he ultimately overcame this paralyzing influence 
of heredity, acquired ambition, and devoted himself 
with the strenuoLisness of a strong man to the work 
that he was fitted by his genius to do in the world. 

Lincoln was born on the 12th of February, 1800. 
He was, therefore, twenty-three years old when, in 
1812, he returned from the Black Hawk War, ran for the 
Legislature, was defeated, and in looking about him lor 
bread-winning employment seriously contemplated the 
apprenticing of himself to a blacksmith. Accident led 
him, instead, to join with another in the purchase of a 
country store, altogether upon credit. The venture was 
doomed to failure from the beginning. Neither partner 
devoted energetic attention to business. Lincoln had 
got possession of some books, including a grammar 
and a copy of Blackstone's Commentaries, and he de- 
voted himself to the study of these to the sad neglect of 
the business of the "store." In the meantime, his part- 
ner devoted himself chiefly to the drinking of whiskey, 
and, between the two, they managed speedily to ruin 
the business, and to bring Lincoln into a slough of debt. 

He next became postmaster, at a miserable wage, 
and assistant to a local surveyor at scarcely more of pay. 
But he now had leisure for the study of law, and he 



204 Gbc fIDcn of tbc Civil imar 

read incessantly. In August, 1814, he was elected to 
the Legislature, and during the six succeeding years he 
was three times re-elected for terms of two years each. 

He did not distinguish himself in his legislative 
career. The questions that arose in the Illinois Legis- 
lature at that time were petty, and of only local signifi- 
cance. There was nothing in them to enlist those 
great emotions of which Lincoln's nature was capable, 
nothing to arouse that conscience which was the domi- 
nating force in his character. He was a clever, business- 
like representative of his constituents, and nothing 
more. The real Abraham Lincoln was not yet born. 

In like manner he failed to make any conspicuous 
place for himself in Congress when, in 1S40, he was 
elected to the National Legislature. He did indeed 
throw himself strenuously into an effort for the aboli- 
tion of slavery in the District of Columbia. Here was 
a matter concerning which he felt deeply and intensely. 
But the time was not yet ripe. The country had not 
yet been aroused to the necessity of dealing in drastic 
ways with this question, and Lincoln, himself hating 
slavery with all the intensity of a nature at once tender 
and robust, was not prepared to take advanced ground 
of attack upon it. There was no response to his effort, 
and his congressional career ended in failure. 

Meantime he had been admitted to the bar of Illinois, 
and had won a good place for himself among the 
lawyers of that State. His persuasiveness of oratory 
especially impressed the people, and prepared the way 
for his advancement as a man offeree and consequence 



Hbrabam ^Lincoln 205 

in politics. He had never lost touch with those whom 
he called " the plain people." He had never forgotten 
how they thought, and reasoned, and felt. He had 
never ceased to be one of themselves or to receive their 
eager recognition as such. He could interpret their 
aspirations as no other man then living could do. He 
could speak for them, " not as the scribes, but as one 
having authority." And, above all, his honesty and 
sincerity were so well recognized and so universally 
approved that "the people heard him gladly" when- 
ever he was minded to speak. 

These were the conditions out of which Lincoln's 
subsequent exaltation grew. But meantime his per- 
sonal life was unhappy in the extreme. 

That humor of which so much has been made, was 
to him, as to many others notable in like manner, 
merely the safety-valve of a nature inclined to sadness 
and subjected always to conditions calculated to breed 
melancholy. Young Lincoln met with that most irrep- 
arable "disappointment in love," the death of the 
woman he loved. For a time his grief threatened the 
integrity of his reason. Later, he formed another at- 
tachment, which in its turn was brought to naught by 
the young woman's rejection of his suit. Still later, he 
courted Mary Todd, a woman of social pretensions far 
above his own, and became engaged to marry her. 
But when the wedding-day came and the guests were 
assembled, Lincoln did not appear. In one of his fits 
of brooding he had come to doubt the sincerity of his af- 
fection for the young woman, and so he simply stayed 



206 Gbc fll>en of tbc Civil Mar 

away from the appointed ceremony. It was at this 
time that the suicidal impulse was so strong upon him 
that he dared not carry even a penknife upon his per- 
son, lest he do himself harm. 

Later the matter was "patched up," and Lincoln 
married Mary Todd, but, if we may accept the testi- 
mony of his biographers and of those who knew him 
intimately in his years of greatness, this marriage was 
the most unfortunate circumstance of all in his career. 

It is not necessary here to pursue inquiry into that 
subject, but it may fairly be wondered how often, dur- 
ing the dark days of the Civil War, — after the seven- 
days' fights around Richmond, after the second defeat 
of Bull Run, after Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, 
and after Grant's fearful punishment in the Wilderness, 
at Spottsylvania, and at Cold Harbor, — the old suicidal 
impulse must have come again upon this man of ten- 
der conscience, whose habit it was to take upon himself 
the blame for every disaster in the field, and for every 
mistake in the Cabinet. 

But this is getting ahead of our story. The repeal 
of the Missouri Compromise in 18S4 brought into 
American politics a question which actively and in- 
tensely engaged Lincoln's heart— the question, as he 
deliberately put it, whether this country should be- 
come "all slave, or all free," whether it should be 
lawful to hold slaves in all the States or in none. In its 
immediateness the question was not so broad as that, 
but, looking to ultimate rather than to immediate re- 
sults, Lincoln thus interpreted the issue. 



Hbrabam ^Lincoln 207 

Here a word of explanation may be in season. 
When, between 1818 and 1821, the territory of Mis- 
souri sought admission to the Union as a State, and 
a demand was made that slavery should be permitted 
there, a great controversy arose between the friends 
and the opponents of slavery. Finally, and as a com- 
promise, it was agreed and enacted in 1821 that Mis- 
souri should be admitted as a slave State, but that 
thereafter slavery should not be carried into any Terri- 
tory west of the Mississippi and north of latitude 36 
30', which was the southern boundary of Missouri. 
For a third of a century this " compromise" furnished 
a modus Vivendi and kept the slavery question, in a 
degree at least, out of practical politics. In i8so, how- 
ever, another "compromise" was found to be neces- 
sary, and it was enacted into law. In the meantime 
the hostility of the North to slavery grew steadily 
stronger, even among men who would have fought, 
as in resentment of a mortal insult, if called by the 
opprobrious term, "abolitionist." The Fugitive Slave 
Law, which to many seemed to make the country 
"all-slave" territory, and the Dred Scott decision, 
which seemed to open all the Territories to slavehold- 
ing, profoundly stirred the nation. Nevertheless the 
Missouri Compromise and its supplement, the Com- 
promise of 1850, warued off the conflict until, in 18S4, 
under the leadership of Stephen A. Douglas, Senator 
from Lincoln's own State of Illinois, the Kansas- 
Nebraska bill was passed. That measure in effect re- 
pealed the Missouri Compromise, and with its passage 



2o8 £bc riDcn of the Civil Mar 

was introduced the doctrine that property in slaves 
was recognized by the Constitution of the United 
States equally with all other property ; that the slave- 
holder could take his negroes into any Territory and 
own them there as freely as any other man could do 
with his horses, his mules, or his cattle ; and that 
not until a State constitution forbidding slavery was 
adopted and accepted by Congress could the institu- 
tion of slavery be excluded from any Territory not yet 
organized into a State. 

Here was Abraham Lincoln's opportunity. Here 
was a question which appealed to the very marrow 
of his soul. Here was an occasion upon which he 
could mightily oppose the extension of slavery without 
incurring the odium of being an "abolitionist" by 
seeming to advocate the extinction of slavery in the 
States wherein it existed as a tradition. 

There was little, if any, chance to defeat Douglas 
for re-election in the State of Illinois, whose political 
machinery the "Little Giant," as he was called, held 
firmly within his grasp. But there was a chance to do 
things much greater than the defeat of Douglas for 
re-election to the Senate. There was opportunity to 
educate the people, and better still, as Lincoln alone 
saw clearly, there was opportunity to end forever 
Douglas's chance of election to the presidency. 

When Lincoln, in i8sS, was pitted against Douglas 
as a rival candidate for the senatorship, and when the 
two had agreed to meet in joint debate, Lincoln 
shrewdly devised questions which need not be set 



Hbrabam ILincoln 209 

forth here, but which forced Douglas, in their answer- 
ing, either to offend the strong pro-slavery sentiment 
of the South or else to strip himself of Democratic 
support in the North. Against the pressing of these 
questions Lincoln's best friends remonstrated. They 
foresaw that the course Lincoln had resolved upon 
would lose him all chance of an election to the Senate. 
But he did not care. A greater question than any that 
vexed 1858 was coming on in [860, and to that Lincoln 
addressed himself. He clearly foresaw that if he could 
compel Douglas to offend and alienate the extreme 
Southern sentiment, that statesman could not be 
nominated as the Democratic candidate for the presi- 
dency in 1S00. He foresaw also, with that political 
sagacity which always distinguished his vision, that 
if Douglas were not nominated no other candidate 
could be found who could even hope to unite the 
Democracy and command the full support of that 
party. 

The Democracy had a clear majority of the votes. 
It was Lincoln's thought to "divide and conquer," 
and he accomplished it. In the contest of i8s8 he 
deliberately sacrificed his own ambition in order that 
he might destroy Douglas and make it possible that 
Seward or Chase, or some other great Republican 
leader, might be elected President in i860. That there 
was no element of personal ambition to inspire this 
self-sacrifice is sufficiently attested by the fact that in 
iSsS the suggestion of Abraham Lincoln's name as 
that of a candidate for the presidency would have been 



210 Gbe flDcn of tbe Civil mnv 

greeted with derision even in Illinois, and in the rest 
of the States with wondering inquiry as to who Abra- 
ham Lincoln might be. 

"Nevertheless, it was in that daring and unsuccess- 
ful campaign against Douglas that Abraham Lincoln 
made himself President of the United States at the 
greatest crisis in the country's history. In that cam- 
paign he forced Douglas to make admissions which 
forever alienated Southern Democrats from him, as 
appeared in the Charleston Convention of i860. Thus 
Lincoln made a united Democracy impossible at a 
time when a united Democracy would very certainly 
have carried the country. So far from being united in 
opposition to Mr. Lincoln's election in 1800, his oppo- 
nents were divided into three parties, one supporting 
Douglas, one loyal to Breckinridge, and one, a forlorn 
hope, voting for that "man in the moon," John Bell 
of Tennessee. Mr. Lincoln's election, in such condi- 
tions, was inevitable, although, when the poll was 
reckoned, there was a popular majority of nearly a 
million votes (947,279) against him, in a total vote of 
4,680,201. 

Almost immediately after the returns showed that 
Lincoln was elected, the long-threatened secession 
movement began. South Carolina led the way, and 
before Lincoln could take his office seven Southern 
States had passed ordinances declaring their with- 
drawal from the Union, and had organized a new 
Confederacy. In the meantime, the government at 
Washington was in the irresolute hands of lames 



Hbrabam Xincoln 2 1 1 

Buchanan, whose sole hope it was to tide over the time 
till the expiry of his term, and some of whose Cabinet 
officers were in open and active sympathy with the 
seceding States. 

When, on the 4th of March, 1S61, Lincoln was in- 
ducted into office, he found himself in surroundings 
more difficult and perplexing than those that any other 
executive head of a great government had ever con- 
fronted. The cotton States had declared their with- 
drawal from the Union, and had seized upon forts, 
arsenals, custom-houses, etc., within their borders. 
Virginia was still stoutly opposed to the policy of 
secession, and had elected by an overwhelming ma- 
jority a strongly pro-Union convention. The other 
border States were disposed to follow Virginia's lead, 
and apparently there was still time and opportunity to 
avert a civil war if wise counsels were followed. But 
what were wise counsels ? Nobody knew. Horace 
Greeley, the most influential of Republican editors, 
had already advocated the recognition of secession as 
a right, and urged the nation to say to the seceding 
States : " Wayward sisters, go in peace." Other lead- 
ers, eqiuilly influential, were clamoring for the instant 
and relentless employment of force to restore the 
Union, while still others contended that there was 
neither constitutional authority nor power enough in 
the government to coerce the seceding States. 

In the midst of this chaos of conflicting counsels 
Lincoln did not command the confidence of the leaders 
of his own party. The country knew him only as a 



212 She flfecn of tbc Civil "Mar 

"smart" Western lawyer and stump speaker, who 
had been nominated only because the convention could 
not agree upon either of the really great party leaders, 
Seward or Chase, and who had been elected only 
because the opposition was divided into three warring 
tactions. 

Very few of the Republican leaders even suspected 
Lincoln of statesmanly capacities. When he put Seward 
at the head o\ his Cabinet and made Chase Secre- 
tary of the Treasury, it was quite generally understood 
that these two, and particularly Sewaid. were to 
conduct the Administration by ministerial dictation, 
leaving to Lincoln no duty except to acquiesce in their 
decisions. 

Seward seriously attempted to act upon this assump- 
tion. He presented to the President a carefully pre- 
pared paper, complaining that the Administration had 
formulated no policy, and himself formulating one for 
the President's acceptance. Mr. Lincoln's response 
was a rebuke all the more severe because o\ its entire 
courtesy ot tone, and because it did not include a 
request for Mr. Seward's resignation, as it might very 
well have done. But that reply taught Seward and the 
other leaders a much-needed lesson. It. in fact, made 
them acquainted with Lincoln for the first time. It 
taught them that, instead of a blundering ignoramus, 
their part_\- had in fact put into the presidency a great, 
strong, sagacious, and masterful man. It taught them 
and the country that Abraham Lincoln was President, 
and resolutely intended to exercise the functions of his 



Hbrabam lincoln 213 

office, and finally, it convinced them of the sagacity of 
his mind and the dominance of that conscience which 
inspired all his thoughts and directed all his courses of 
conduct. 

In the same way, from the beginning the radical 
abolitionists clamorously urged Lincoln to convert the 
war for the salvation of the Union into a war against 
the institution of slavery in the States. This he reso- 
lutely refused to do, upon the double ground of policy 
and right. To do so, he reminded the radicals, would 
alienate from the cause a powerful support which it 
could not afford to dispense with. There were men 
by hundreds of thousands who were ready to support 
the government in an effort to restore and preserve 
the Union, but who would not, on any plea then 
available, consent to a war for the extirpation of 
slavery by the federal power, in States in which it 
lawfully and constitutionally existed. So much for 
policy. On higher grounds than those of policy, Lin- 
coln reminded his urgent advisers that while they 
were free to advocate any proceeding that might please 
them, he was bound by his oath of office not to make 
constitutions or override them, but to observe the 
Constitution as it existed and to enforce the laws as 
they were. 

Still later, when he decided in his own mind and 
conscience that it was his right and duty to issue a 
limited and qualified proclamation of emancipation, as 
a measure necessary to the success of the war and 
the preservation of the Union, he wrote the document 



2i4 Gbc fIDen of the Civil Mar 

himself, without consulting anybody. Having com- 
pleted it he submitted it to his Cabinet, but in doing so 
he notified the members of that body that he was not 
consulting them with regard to the wisdom or propri- 
ety of his act in issuing the proclamation, but solely 
with regard to its rhetorical form. 

In the same spirit of independence, and with a like 
readiness to take responsibility upon himself, he dis- 
missed his War Secretary for inefficiency, and dared to 
appoint to that exalted office, on grounds of superior 
fitness alone, Edwin M. Stanton, a Democrat, politi- 
cally opposed to the Administration, profoundly dis- 
trusting its sincerity and its capacity, and not even 
commended to his favor by personal friendship for 
himself. He saw in Stanton a sincere patriot and a 
man capable of " getting things done," and done well. 
He therefore invited Stanton to become Secretary of 
War, in face of partisan jealousies and personal re- 
sentments. It would be difficult to imagine a loftier 
or more courageous act of administration than this 
was under the circumstances, and certainly none in all 
the history of Lincoln's Administration accomplished 
more than Stanton's appointment did for the result to 
which alone Lincoln's efforts were directed, namely, 
the restoration and perpetuation of the Union. 

But again we are anticipating the order of events. 
When he came into office Lincoln realized the diffi- 
culties of the situation as no other man of that time 
seems to have done. The doctrine that a State had 
a right peaceably to withdraw from the Union had 



Hbrabam Xincoln 215 

been long and widely accepted. New England had 
threatened, in the Hartford Convention and upon at 
least one other occasion, to resort to secession as a 
remedy for conditions deemed intolerable. N. P. 
Banks, a distinguished representative of Mr. Lincoln's 
own party, and its first Speaker of the House of Rep- 
resentatives, had met the Southern threat of disunion 
with the slangy but expressive adjuration to " Let the 
Union slide," rather than consent to certain proposed 
aggressions of the slave power. The right of the 
government to coerce a seceding State into submis- 
sion was denied by many and doubted by multitudes 
in both parties. To have inaugurated military opera- 
tions, based upon the assertion of that right, at that 
time, would have been madness. It would have 
alienated from the Administration a world of support 
that Mr. Lincoln's wiser methods secured to it and 
retained. 

Whatever the rights of the government in the 
matter of coercion might be, the people clearly under- 
stood and recognized the right and duty of the Presi- 
dent to repossess the forts, arsenals, custom-houses, 
and other public property that had been seized by the 
seceding States. To that end, for the time at least, he 
directed military operations, and in that purpose he had 
the support of the country. 

Then came a perplexing situation, and a most un- 
fortunate event. Virginia —without whose pith and 
substance there could have been no war of conse- 
quence, and without whose geographical position 



216 Zbe fIDcn of tbe Civil TWlar 

there could have been no effective line of military 
resistance— still stood out against secession as a policy, 
and the border States were awaiting her lead. The 
people of that State very generally believed in the right 
of a State to secede, but they had indicated, by their 
choice of men to represent them in the Constitutional 
Convention, their firm conviction that Mr. Lincoln's 
election had given no proper occasion for the exercise 
of that right. Even until the bombardment and cap- 
ture of Fort Sumter, the Virginia Convention remained 
resolutely and overwhelmingly opposed to the policy 
of secession. But in order to carry out his policy of 
recovering the forts, arsenals, etc., Mr. Lincoln must 
have troops, and the regular army could not furnish 
them. That army consisted of a mere handful of men, 
scattered over the country from Maine to California, 
and mainly engaged in the indispensable work of hold- 
ing the Indians to peace. There was no alternative but 
to call upon the States for their several quotas of mili- 
tiamen or volunteers. This Mr. Lincoln did. He asked 
for seventy-five thousand men, and apportioned the 
call among the States that had not yet seceded. Vir- 
ginia was called upon for her quota, and she must 
either furnish the men or go into the revolt which she 
had previously refused to join. But to furnish the 
men would be to lend the State's military strength to 
what the people there sincerely believed to be an un- 
warranted and unjust war of coercion and subjugation, 
for which they, at least, found no warrant in the Con- 
stitution or in the history of the country. To the 



Hbrabam Uincoln 217 

Virginian mind there seemed no alternative to seces- 
sion but dishonor, and a convention which had long 
stood out against secession as a policy, instantly ac- 
cepted it by an almost unanimous vote as an obliga- 
tion of honor. That ended the hesitation of the other 
border States, and the war was on. 

This is not the place in which to recount the history 
of that long and bloody struggle. Nor is there necessity 
to do so. The history of that time is familiar to every 
educated reader. But certain facts concerning it must 
be pointed out because of their bearing upon the career 
and their incidental illustration of the character of 
Abraham Lincoln. 

The South had certain important advantages over 
the North at the beginning of the struggle. It had 
made up its mind to war from the beginning, and much 
had been done there in the way of preparation which 
could not have been done at the North under the cir- 
cumstances then existing. Moreover, the Southern 
people, after the secession of Virginia, were practically 
a unit in behalf of their cause, while at the North there 
was so great a division of sentiment and opinion that 
even so late as the summer of 1854 there was grave 
doubt felt as to the re-election of Mr. Lincoln over a 
candidate whose platform unequivocally denounced the 
war for the Union as a failure, and demanded its cessa- 
tion, with the plainly implied condition of recognizing 
Southern independence, or in some other way yielding 
to the demands of the South. 

As for Mr. Lincoln himself, his perplexities from 



218 Zbc riDcn of tbe Civil Mat- 

beginning to end of the war, and his occasions for de- 
pression, were such as must have been intolerable to 
any soul less resolute, less courageous, or less infinitely 
enduring than his. For every defeat of an army in the 
field he felt that the people held him responsible. For 
every failure of a campaign he bitterly blamed himself. 
His policies were carpingly criticised in Congress, in 
the public prints, and in private interviews with men 
who, representing large though often ill-informed por- 
tions of the people, eagerly and sometimes even angrily 
pressed unwise advice upon him. 

It is the highest proof of his greatness that he endured 
all this and with a calm mind pursued to the end his 
one fixed purpose to restore and perpetuate the Union 
of these States. 

When the evacuation of Richmond and the sur- 
render of the small remaining fragment of Lee's army 
marked the accomplishment of that great purpose, 
Lincoln still had before him a task that might well have 
appalled him— the task of reconstruction. There can 
be no doubt that his efforts would have been directed 
to the single-minded purpose of restoring the Union, 
healing the wounds of war, and, as quickly as possible, 
obliterating the history of that four years of conflict as 
a ghastly memory that should be buried and forgotten. 
In that task he must have encountered all of antagonism 
that prejudice could invoke, and all of difficulty that 
passion could plant in his pathway. But Lincoln's 
work was done. These new and perplexing problems 
were not for him to solve. Almost at the moment 



Hbiabam Xincoln 219 

when the fruition of his labors came to him, he was 
stricken down by the bullet of an assassin, who pro- 
fessed to act in the name of that South to which he had 
never rendered a single hour's service in her time of 
need. 

In the North Lincoln's death was everywhere ac- 
cepted as a personal bereavement. In the South the 
assassination was resented as a crime, done in the 
name, but without the will of the Southern people, 
and also as the most grievous calamity that could 
have befallen them in their hour of sorest tribulation. 
For the people of the South had by that time 
learned in some degree to understand Abraham 
Lincoln. They had learned that he entertained no 
feeling of hostility to them ; that his sole purpose 
throughout the war had been to bring about the res- 
toration of the Union with the least possible of suf- 
fering or violence, and that with that end accomplished 
he would have busied himself — as his hurried am- 
nesty proclamation bore eloquent witness — in the 
restoration of peace and good will between the lately 
warring sections. 

On the other hand they profoundly distrusted An- 
drew Johnson, the Vice-president who must succeed 
Lincoln as chief magistrate. Johnson was a Southerner, 
and the men of the South regarded him as a renegade. 
They saw in his nature none of that gentle kindness of 
spirit which characterized Mr. Lincoln, and certainly 
none of that exalted sentiment of justice which was 
the very marrow of Mr. Lincoln's nature. And Andrew 



22o £bc fIDcn of tbe Civil IKIlar 

Johnson took hurried pains to prove that in this esti- 
mate the men of the South were right. To no other 
part of the country was Lincoln's assassination a sorer 
calamity than to the Southern States. 




ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT 

GENERAL GRANT was the typical modern sol- 
dier, as distinguished from the soldier of more 
imaginative times. War was to him a mat- 
ter of simple, practical business, with no "pomp and 
circumstance," and nothing "glorious" about it. His 
sole idea of strategy, whether in the conduct of a cam- 
paign or in the ordering of a battle, was to " get things 
done." He reckoned up the means at his own com- 
mand and those that the enemy could bring to bear 
against him. He considered how best he could employ 
his means to the accomplishment of the ends aimed at, 
and ordered his movements accordingly. 

He brought to bear upon the conduct of battles and 
the planning of campaigns precisely the same sort of 
intelligence that he would have used if charged with 
the duty of removing a hill, or piercing it with a tun- 
nel, or building a railroad, or doing anything else which 
required the wise employment of easily calculable re- 
sources in overcoming difficulties that could be, in a 
measure at least, estimated. 

Grant had an iron will, indomitable courage, tireless 



222 £bc flDcn of tbc Civil Max 

patience, and a persistence and pertinacity that knew no 
limit. And these qualities in him were not crippled, as 
they have been in many other commanders, by any 
weakness of sentiment or by any misleading of the 
imagination. 

There is no doubt that he had tender pity for the 
sufferings to which he must subject his soldiers in order 
to accomplish the purposes they were set to achieve. 
There cannot be a question that he felt keen sympathy 
with his men in their hardships, and alert sorrow for 
the slaughter they endured and for that which he must 
inflict upon the enemy. But these were the means 
given to him for the accomplishment of world-impor- 
tant ends, and he did not flinch from their employment 
to the uttermost. 

As for imagination, he seems never to have per- 
mitted that faculty of his mind to interfere with his 
calculations or his plans. General Sherman once said 
that Grant had advantage over himself in the fact 
that Grant never worried concerning what the enemy 
might be doing or intending to do somewhere out of 
his sight, but acted always upon the tacts within 
range of his discovery, while he — Sherman — was 
constantly distressing himself with imaginings of pos- 
sibilities. In other words, General Grant never per- 
mitted his imagination to take the reins from reason. 

He was not at all a sentimental person, but very 
certainly he was not deficient in the tenderer senti- 
ments of humanity becoming to a strong man. When 
he was President he manifested his compassionate 




Ulysses Simpson (irant 

>tograph by W, Kurtz, N. V. 



Zhe flften of tbe Civil 



■ 



TIllpsscs Simpson (Brant 225 

nature by urging the newspaper correspondents to 
make a crusade in behalf of the comfort of horses. 
In other and higher ways Grant's tenderness of senti- 
ment was shown on many occasions. Thus when 
the garrison at Vicksburg surrendered, he issued an 
order to forbid the wounding of a conquered enemy's 
feelings. "Instruct the commands," the order read, 
"to be orderly and quiet as these prisoners pass, and 
to make no offensive remarks." When he visited 
General Lee at Appomattox to receive his surrender 
he wore a blouse, with no trappings about him and 
with no sword at his belt. And after the surrender 
he forbade all cheering, generously intent upon sparing 
the feelings of a conquered foe. Still other examples 
may be cited to show that under his cold, business- 
like exterior General Grant was inspired by sentiments 
as warmly generous as any that more demonstrative 
soldiers have shown. When Andrew Johnson threat- 
ened the arrest of Lee for treason Grant was alert to 
remind him that in accepting Lee's surrender he had 
promised the Southern leader immunity from that in- 
dignity. And when Johnson manifested a disposition 
to persist, Grant "ended the incident" by announcing, 
in his calm, determined way, that if Lee were mo- 
lested, he — Grant — would resign his command of the 
army and leave it to the people to decide between 
himself and "his Accidency," the President. 

There is no doubt, indeed, that General Grant felt 
all the highest sentiments and enthusiasms of the 
soldier. Fortunately for his campaigns he did not let 



2?4 Cbe fIDcn of tbc Civil Mar 

these sentiments interfere with the necessary but more 
brutal work of war, the work of killing men and 
maiming them in order that the great purposes of war 
might be accomplished. 

There is absolutely no question now in any well- 
informed mind that it was General Grant chiefly who 
made the war for the Union successful. 

Born at Point Pleasant, Ohio, on the 27th of April, 
1822, he had been educated at West Point, graduating 
low in his class. He had served at various frontier 
posts. He had done such service in the Mexican 
War as to demonstrate his quality and to secure 
him promotion to the rank o\ captain. Then he had 
resigned to engage, unsuccessfully, in business in St. 
Louis. Quitting that business he had gone to Galena, 
Illinois, on a salary of S800 a year, which was eked out 
by the earnings of his slaves in Missouri. When the 
war broke out he offered his services to the gov- 
ernment, but got no answer. Presently he was elected 
colonel of an Illinois regiment of volunteers, and in 
August, [861, he was appointed a brigadier-general of 
volunteers. Thus by the back door, as it were, did 
this greatest commander of the national armies in the 
Civil War reach a position in which he could show 
what stuff he was made of and what manner of man 
he was. 

He was ordered to Cairo, Illinois, at the junction of 
the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The enemy had 
seized upon the strategic points of Columbus, twenty- 
live miles below Cairo, and Hickman, a little farther 



Trusses Simpson ©rant 225 

down the river. Grant learned that the enemy's pur- 
pose was next to seize upon Padncah, Kentucky, fifty 
miles up the Ohio, and he instantly set out to defeat it. 
Without orders — and in his case, as a brigadier-general 
of volunteers, being without orders meant being with- 
out permission to undertake such an operation— he 
resolved to prevent this. He moved at once with the 
force at hand, seized Paducah and held it, issuing a 
proclamation to the people in which he said, " 1 have 
nothing to do with opinions and shall deal only with 
armed rebellion and its aiders and abettors." 

That was his attitude throughout the war. He 
held himself to be nothing but a soldier charged with 
the work of a soldier, and he adhered to that view not 
only during the war but after it, as was illustrated in 
the incident already related of his controversy with 
President Andrew Johnson as to the fulfilment of the 
promise he had given Lee at Appomattox. 

At the time of his seizure of Paducah, Grant had 
not yet " won his spurs" as a military commander; 
nor did he win them in his first independent battle, 
at Belmont, Missouri. For a time successful in the fight, 
he was ultimately driven back and forced to re-embark 
his troops upon the steamboats that had carried them 
to the point of conflict. Nevertheless, he had won 
respect by the stubbornness of his fighting and by the 
extent of the losses he had inflicted upon the enemy. 

Now, for the first time, Grant began planning a 
campaign. In January, 1802, he went to St. Louis and 
submitted his plan to his commander, General Halleck. 



226 £bc flDen of tbc Civil Mar 

It concerned itself with the strategic advantage pos- 
sessed by the Southern forces in holding Forts Henry 
and Donelson, the one on the Tennessee, and the other 
on the Cumberland River. Possession of those forts 
gave them command of two practically navigable riv- 
ers leading into the very heart of the Confederacy. It 
was Grant's idea to reverse this advantage by the cap- 
ture of those forts, and he was convinced that with the 
aid of the gunboats he could seize and retain the two 
strongholds. He asked permission to do so. Halleck 
refused it with manifest impatience. But Grant sub- 
mitted his plans again later, with the strong support of 
Commodore Foote, commander of the naval force. At 
last, on the ist of February, Halleck consented to let 
Grant make the attempt, and on the next day the fu- 
ture commander-in-chief of the national armies set out 
to demonstrate what he could do with a meagre force 
unsupported by prospective reinforcements from any 
quarter. The story of the campaign is a familiar one. 
Grant captured both forts and thus planted the national 
power in the midst of the Confederacy, while open- 
ing the two great rivers as inestimably valuable lines 
of communication and of supply to the national forces 
destined to operate farther south. 

This was the fust of the decisive actions of the 
Civil War— the first capture of commanding strategic 
positions made anywhere by the Union forces. It was 
also the marked beginning of Grant's career as a com- 
mander given to accomplishing military ends by the 
determined use of military means. It opened the way 



TTllv»5SC6 Simpson (Brant 227 

to his future campaigns. A general who had res- 
cued two important rivers from the enemy's control, 
and captured two commanding strategic positions and 
with them 14,623 men, (is pieces of artillery, and 17,000 
stands of small arms, was certainly not one to be 
further restrained by that superior officer who had so 
reluctantly given him permission to undertake this bril- 
liant operation. There is every reason to believe that 
Halleck still disliked and distrusted Grant, but in face 
of such achievements the commanding general could 
not forbid his subordinate to go on and win the war. 

Promoted to be major-general of volunteers, but 
still holding no rank in the regular army, Grant in- 
stantly began to look about him for other opportu- 
nities of successful campaigning. With that instinct 
of promptitude in action which has always been the 
mark of a great soldier he planned a new campaign 
and instead of asking for permission to execute it he 
simply notified his superior that unless forbidden by 
express orders he intended to carry out his plans. 
This disregard of red tape brought Grant into new dis- 
favor at headquarters, and for a time he was sus- 
pended from his command. But on 13th March he 
was restored to authority in view of the pressing need 
for his services which was created by a great concen- 
tration of the Confederates near Corinth, Mississippi, 
under Albert Sydney Johnston and Beauregard. With 
about 18.000 available men Grant established himself 
at Pittsburg Landing, to meet the obviously intended 
assault of the enemy. He placed his entire force south 



228 h\k fIDen of tbe Civil TWlar 

of the river. It was a hazardous thing to do. It put 
the river at his back, thus making it certain that any- 
thing like a decisive defeat of his army must be beyond 
measure disastrous and destructive. But on the other 
hand it gave to him the utmost available force with 
which to repel the assault of the enemy, and it was 
Grant's habit of mind to consider present problems to 
the neglect of future contingencies. It was his plan 
to beat off the enemy's assault, and he did not much 
concern himself with the problem of retreat in case he 
should himself be beaten. 

In the minds of military critics there is not the 
smallest doubt to-day that the results at Pittsburg 
Landing were made possible solely by Grant's daring 
in thus throwing the whole of his forces across the 
river. Even with all of them at command he had an 
exceedingly difficult task in maintaining a precarious 
foothold beyond the river till the coming of Buell's 
army enabled him to drive back the fierce second onset 
of the enemy. With less than the whole of his force 
he must apparently have been driven into the river, 
with a badly broken and disorganized army, on the 
evening of the first day and many hours before the 
arrival of Buell's strong column. 

For that first day's struggle was unmistakably a Con- 
federate victory, at least up to something near the end 
of it. Grant's forces were attacked in the early morning, 
badly broken, and, after a desperate day's fighting, 
beaten back to the river, until it seemed for a time that 
they must be driven into the stream to perish there. 



TEUpsses Simpson Grant 229 

But Grant's obstinacy and determination stood in the 
way. Concentrating what remained of his strength 
upon the river bank, he made so stout a resistance that 
Beauregard shrank from a charge across that valley of 
the shadow of death which lay between him and 
Grant's cornered and desperate artillery. To this we 
have Beauregard's written testimony, presented many 
years afterwards. 

Thus Grant saved for himself a chance of re-inforce- 
ment and of further fighting, and for the Federal army 
a foothold south of the very last natural barrier between 
it and the Gulf of Mexico. When Buell came up the 
previously victorious Confederates were driven into a 
retreat which carried them well into Mississippi, and 
left in front of the invading force not a single serious 
physical obstacle thence to Mobile. 

In the opinion of some critics, this was the strategic 
turning-point of the Civil War. They contend that by 
his desperate stand on the southern bank of the river, 
giving time for Buell to re-inforce him, Grant made the 
cutting in two and the ultimate destruction of the Con- 
federacy inevitable. 

Nevertheless, there was much and tremendous work 
to be done. There was still the superb power of reso- 
lute Southern armies to overcome, and to this task 
Grant addressed himself as soon as General Halleck, 
who had hurried to Pittsburg Landing to assume per- 
sonal command, permitted him to prosecute his plans 
further. 

The Confederates still held Vicksburar and Port 



2jo Zbc flDcn of the Civil Mar 

Hudson, and thus rendered the great Mississippi River 
a "no thoroughfare" between the Federal forces at 
New Orleans and those upon the river above. Vicks- 
burg was clearly the key to the strategic situation, and 
Grant's eminently practical mind turned to the conquest 
of that strong position as the natural and necessary ' ' ob- 
jective " of the next campaign. 

But it was not until the autumn that he was left 
again with a free hand, after some battles in which the 
advantage had been often on the side of the Southern 
arms. 

Grant's first plan was to send Sherman down the 
river, and himself to advance upon the rearofVicksburg 
by way of Holly Springs, Grenada, etc. He presently 
found his line of communications by this route too long 
and too attenuated to be successfully defended against 
an alert and active foe. He therefore moved his whole 
force to and down the Mississippi. It was in January 
that he arrived at a point near Vicksburg and took 
personal direction of the operations against that strong- 
hold. Grant had the gunboats "run the batteries," a 
feat celebrated in song, and landing his forces, pushed 
them into a distinctly perilous position between Pem- 
berton, defending Vicksburg, Johnston, operating from 
the interior of Mississippi for the relief of the strong- 
hold, and the troops at Port Hudson, farther down the 
river. The operation occupied months of almost in- 
cessant battle, and on the fourth of July Vicksburg sur- 
rendered. Port Hudson fell as a necessary consequence, 
and the Confederacy was cleft in twain. Grant had 



lapses Simpson (Brant 231 

recovered for the Union the undisputed control of the 
Mississippi from Minnesota to the mouth. 

Grant was now made a major-general in the regular 
army and placed in supreme command of all the west- 
ern armies with Sherman, Thomas, and Burnside for his 
chief lieutenants. A series of brilliant operations and 
bloody battles around Knoxville and Chattanooga, and 
the battle of Chickamauga, resulted in driving the Con- 
federates out of Tennessee and into Georgia. Thus by 
the spring of 1864 Grant had succeeded in opening the 
Mississippi, recovering control of Tennessee, and enor- 
mously crippling the enemy's resources. But there 
yet remained the tremendous power of Lee and the 
Army of Northern Virginia to be broken. One after 
another the great Confederate had beaten and driven 
back greatly superior forces under McClellan, Pope, 
Hooker, and Burnside, and he had twice formidably 
invaded the North, fighting two of the greatest battles 
of the war beyond the Potomac. 

It is true that Lee's army had suffered enormous 
losses in the battles around Richmond, at Antietam, at 
Fredericksburg, at Chancellorsville, at Gettysburg, and 
in many severe contests of lesser note ; it is true too that 
the country behind him was pretty well exhausted of 
both men and supplies, and that he could draw scarcely 
any reinforcements from such Confederate armies as 
there were in other parts of the South without inviting 
the immediate overrunning of the cotton States and a 
complete collapse of the Confederate power. Never- 
theless, Lee and his army now constituted the greatest 



232 Cbc flDcn of tbc Civil Uflar 

danger to the Union, the most serious obstacle to be 
overcome, at a time when a threatening political party 
at the North was preparing to nominate its candidate for 
the presidency upon a platform declaring the war to be 
a failure. 

There was thus a double and very immediate reason 
for doing all that was possible during the summer of 
1S04 for the destruction or the crippling of Lee. To 
that task, early in the spring, Grant was called. He 
was transferred to Washington, made lieutenant-gen- 
eral, and placed in command of all the armies of the 
Union. 

Then began that fierce struggle of the giants which 
ended at Appomattox after nearly a year of such strenu- 
ous fighting as military history has very rarely recorded. 

Grant's plan of campaign was simple and practical. 
The Union armies greatly outnumbered those of the 
South, but hitherto their strength had been much im- 
paired by attempts to occupy points that it was not 
necessary to occupy, and to hold regions that there was 
no strategic need to hold. Grant saw clearly that the 
Confederate power of resistance lay in the splendid 
fighting quality of the Southern armies, and that until 
those armies should be overthrown the war could not 
be brought to an end, no matter what or how much 
territory or what or how many important towns might 
be occupied. He decided that the sole "objective" 
of his campaigning should be the destruction of the 
Southern armies rather than the mere occupation of 
Southern towns and States. Here was the keynote of 



Tttlpsees Simpson Giant 233 

his policy, and it is necessary to bear it always in mind 
if we would rightly estimate the military genius that 
inspired the operations of the war after Grant assumed 
supreme command. 

It has often been said, by way of criticism, that 
Grant fought a series of exceedingly costly and bloody 
battles in order to reach a position before Petersburg and 
Richmond which he might have reached without the 
loss of a man by an advance up the James River — a 
path which McClellan's campaign had clearly pointed 
out to him. He did nothing of the kind. He did 
indeed fight terrible battles, but nut for the purpose 
assumed. To plant his army before Richmond, and 
especially before Richmond's military key, Petersburg, 
was not at all Grant's primary object. His first and 
chief purpose was to break Lee's power of resistance 
before beginning a siege in which he must assail one of 
the finest and best commanded armies that the world has 
ever seen, securely entrenched and protected by every 
engineering device known to military science. In other 
words Grant's " objective " was not Richmond or Peters- 
burg, but Lee's army, and there is no shadow of doubt 
that he crippled the power of that splendid military 
machine far more by the terrible fighting in the Wilder- 
ness, at Spottsylvania, and at Cold Harbor than he 
could have done with equal effort and loss by moving 
up the Peninsula and setting himself down before the 
Confederate capital and its commanding outpost. It 
was inevitable that he should suffer terrific losses in 
these operations, but he had reckoned upon that as a 



234 Ebc flDcn of tbc Civil Mar 

part of the price the nation must pay for its ultimate 
deliverance, and, after all, these losses, heavy as they 
were, were doubtless much smaller than would have 
been suffered in the siege of Richmond and Petersburg 
had Grant adopted the plan that his critics suggest 
as wiser than his own. From the point of view that 
regards strategy as the art of accomplishing military 
ends, it is impossible to regard Grant's campaign from 
the Wilderness to Petersburg otherwise than as emi- 
nently wise and brilliantly successful. 

But the conduct of the war in Virginia was by no 
means all of it. Having set out to crush Lee's army, 
recognizing it as the very vitals of Confederate resist- 
ance, Grant took pains that it should receive no acces- 
sions of strength from any quarter to make good its 
losses in battle and to offset the reinforcements he was 
constantly drawing from the North to repair the terrible 
ravages in his own columns. To that end he concen- 
trated all the forces of the Union in a number of effective 
and well commanded armies and set to each its task. 
Sherman, with the combined forces in the West, was 
ordered so to operate against Johnston at Atlanta as to 
forbid the sending of reinforcements to Lee, and. if 
possible, to achieve a victory in that quarter ; Banks, 
at New Orleans, was ordered to can)- on an offensive 
campaign against Mobile, so that no troops might be 
spared from the forces defending that post : Butler, in 
command of the Peninsula, was ordered to threaten 
Petersburg and Richmond with all his force, and thus 
prevent Beauregard from sending assistance to Lee. 



TUlvsses Simpson (Srant 235 

Meantime Sigel was directed to carry on persistently 
active operations in the Valley of Virginia to prevent 
the strengthening of Lee from the Confederate forces 
there. 

Thus Lee received no considerable reinforcements 
during that month of ceaseless pounding, and although 
Grant had lost forty or fifty thousand men in the cam- 
paign, he at last sat down in front of Lee's trenches 
relatively much stronger than at the beginning of the 
campaign. For the men that Lee had lost in the fearful 
struggle could never be replaced, while Grant's own 
losses were easily and quickly made good by reinforce- 
ments. 

This was assuredly the strategy of common sense, 
and Grant pursued it to the end. The breaking of Lee's 
resisting power was very clearly and very certainly the 
one military problem to be solved. 

Again recognizing his advantage of superior num- 
bers, Grant at once began extending his Petersburg 
lines to the left and front, compelling Lee to make a 
like extension until the Confederate forces were drawn 
out into an attenuated thread, and finally cutting one 
of their important lines of communication by crossing 
the Weldon Railroad and establishing himself securely 
west of it. 

Meantime he continued his policy of keeping the 
Confederate forces in other parts of the South hard 
pressed by the ceaseless operations of Sherman, Sheri- 
dan. Thomas, and his other lieutenants, several im- 
portant battles resulting. Sherman pushed his way to 



236 Zbc flDcn of tbe Civil TJUar 

Atlanta, and entered that stronghold at the beginning 
of September. Under Grant's direction Sheridan made 
earnest and successful war against Early in the Valley 
of Virginia ; and all along Grant's own line, from a point 
north of Richmond to the southern extremity of his 
works south of Petersburg, he directed a ceaseless 
series of assaults, now here and now there, some of 
them resulting in the seizure of important works, and 
all of them so planned and timed as to give the enemy 
no opportunity to concentrate his forces anywhere. 

In November Sherman, at Atlanta, abandoned his 
base and communications and began his march to Sa- 
vannah, leaving Thomas in command of the forces in 
Tennessee. Instead of following Sherman, the Con- 
federates, under Hood, pushed their columns north- 
ward, and assailed Thomas's forces at Nashville and 
Franklin, reaping a harvest of disaster as the result. 
Within less than a month Sherman reached Savannah, 
and invested that city, forcing the enemy to evacuate it. 
About the same time Grant sent a combined naval and 
military force, under direction of Butler, to capture Fort 
Fisher, a Confederate stronghold of great importance 
near Wilmington, North Carolina. Butler failed, but 
Grant held to his purpose, and sent a second expedition 
under Terry to execute it. Terry succeeded, after one 
of the most desperate struggles of the war. 

Thus, within three quarters of a year after taking 
supreme command, Grant's operations had so far broken 
up the Confederate power of resistance that the end of 
the struggle manifestly drew near. But there remained 



Tfllpsses Simpson (Brant 237 

Lee with the remnant of his splendid Army of Northern 
Virginia, and while Lee remained in the field there was 
no safety for the Union. Grant planned, therefore, for a 
second campaign in the spring of 1865, directed, as be- 
fore, to the sole purpose of crushing Lee's army. In 
preparation for this, and while waiting for spring to 
make field operations in Eastern Virginia practicable, he 
ordered Sherman, with his army of 60,000 men, to 
march northward from Savannah, brought Schofield 
from Tennessee to Alexandria, Virginia, whence he sent 
him by sea to North Carolina to operate against Wil- 
mington, and directed Sheridan to drive Early out of 
the Valley of Virginia. These operations were bril- 
liantly successful. 

In the meantime Sherman on his northward march 
had captured Columbia, South Carolina, thus cutting 
Charleston off and compelling its evacuation. Thence 
he continued his march northward, stoutly but unsuc- 
cessfully opposed by Johnston at every available point 
of resistance. He reached Goldsboro, North Carolina, 
on March 23d where Schofield, who had come up from 
Wilmington, was awaiting him with reinforcements. 

Still pursuing the plan he had followed from the 
beginning, Grant kept his lieutenants in every part of 
the country at work to prevent the sending of rein- 
forcements to Lee or Johnston and to prevent the pos- 
sibility of a junction between those two. He brought 
Sheridan to Petersburg, sent Hancock to command the 
troops near Washington, ordered Pope, in Missouri, to 
drive Price beyond Red River, directed Canby, at New 



238 Gbc fIDcn of tbc Civil War 

Orleans, to move in force against Mobile, and Stone- 
man to march from East Tennessee toward Lynchburg, 
Virginia. 

The time was now ripe for the final struggle, and 
Grant made his dispositions accordingly, his plan being 
to break through Lee's lines south of Petersburg, thus 
compelling Lee to abandon his entrenchments and go 
into hurried, harassed, and hopeless retreat. In order 
that the retreat might be made harassed and hopeless 
he sent Sheridan to Dinwiddie Court House, and thence 
on to Five Forks, so that when the retreat should begin 
he might hang upon Lee's left flank and front and force 
him out of his line of march, pressing him towards 
James River on the north and rendering it impossible 
for him to reach the Roanoke, which offered his only 
possible line of renewed defence. Other dispositions 
were made with like purpose, and on the 2d of April, 
following a brilliant success achieved by Sheridan at 
Five Forks, Grant hurled his entire force against Lee's 
main line of defences at Petersburg and carried them, 
driving Lee into a confused retreat, both Richmond and 
Petersburg being evacuated that night. 

With Sheridan well in front on Lee's left, with strong 
forces closely following Sheridan, and with Grant 
pressing the Confederate rear, the remnant of Lee's 
army was steadily pressed back toward the James River 
and kept almost ceaselessly in action. 

After a week of this struggle Lee found himself at 
Appomattox, with his army reduced to a meagre force, 
with no food for his soldiers and no source of supply, 



TMpsses Simpson (Brant 239 

with Sheridan and Ord in front of him, Grant on his 
left and rear, and with no thoroughfare open to him in 
any direction. He had no choice but to surrender be- 
fore his already famished men should starve to death, 
and on the 9th of April he capitulated. 

Grant's work of war was ended. The task he had 
undertaken a year before was done. The programme 
he had marked out for himself when he crossed into the 
Wilderness and had resolutely adhered to was now ful- 
filled. He had broken the Confederate power of resist- 
ance and in effect the war was over. 

The next three years of Grant's life afforded a 
severer trial of his character than war itself had done. 
His protest against the purpose of President Johnson 
to bring Lee and the other surrendered Confederate 
leaders to trial on charges of high treason, accompanied 
as that protest was by a written threat to resign his 
commission if that course were persisted in, gave offence 
to the President, the more because it aroused a popular 
sentiment which compelled Johnson to abandon his 
cherished purpose. From that time forward there was 
an almost continuous struggle between the President 
and the General of the army— for to that rank, revived 
by Congress especially for Grant's rewarding, he was 
raised in 1866. This contest placed Grant in a most 
delicate and embarrassing position, compelling him in 
many cases to choose between violating the law on the 
one hand and disobeying the orders of his superior 
officer on the other. With that superb moral courage 
which was the dominant characteristic of the man, 



Cl.v flDen of the Civil tUar 

Grant steadfastly and at all hazards adhered to what 
he conceived to he his duty throughout all that trying 
period, and from beginning to end of it he triumphed. 
He had Congress and the people with him and so far 
from damaging his popularity his contest with Johnson 
brought him into even greater favor than before with 
his countrymen, though there is not the slightest 
reason to suppose that he ever took that result into 
consideration. His course was determined at even- 
step by his convictions of duty, and apparently with- 
out any regard whatever to personal consequences. 

It was quite inevitable that Grant should he chosen 
President at the election oi 1S0S. Only his refusal to 
accept the post could have prevented that, and he did 
not refuse it. He was elected in Novemher by an 
overwhelming majority of both the popular and elec- 
toral votes, and he entered upon the office in March. 
[869. 

His acceptance o\ the presidency was deemed by 
many of his friends at the time a mistake. It was 
thought to he a step perilous to his popularity. While 
he remained General of the army he was subject to no 
political hostility, no partisan criticism. He belonged 
to no party. His fame was the cherished possession 
of all men who rejoiced in the restoration of the Union 
by virtue of his splendid military achievements. The 
moment he hecame the candidate of one party he was 
subject to the antagonism and the hostile criticisn 
the other. When he entered upon office the country 
w as still wrestling with perplexed questions growing 



Tlllssses Simpson Grant 241 

out of the war and reconstruction and the status of 
the negro at the South. As President lie must affirma- 
tively deal with these matters, and it was impossible 
that he should so deal with them as not to offend and 
antagonize a large part of the people. 

In fact that is what occurred. At the end of his 
first term a considerable body of influential Republicans, 
including some of the most potent of Republican news- 
paper editors, went into revolt, nominated Horace 
Greeley, and sought alliance with the Democrats for 
his election. The effort failed conspicuously and Grant 
was re-elected by even larger popular and electoral 
majorities than before. 

It is not the purpose of this essay to review the acts 
of Grant's administration in detail or to criticise them 
closely. Without doubt he made serious mistakes, 
partly through his lack of acqaintance with politics and 
politicians, and partly through his mistaken estimates 
of men. But also, without doubt, he rendered some 
very notable services to the country by his administra- 
tive acts, and by the exercise of his influence. 

Chief among these must be reckoned his work in 
rescuing the nation from threatened repudiation and 
financial dishonor, and in leading the way to the resto- 
ration of a sound currency. 

To these purposes he devoted himself earnestly from 
the beginning. It was due to his insistent urging that 
Congress, early in his first term, passed "an Act to 
strengthen the public credit " by pledging the national 
honor to the payment of all the government's obligations 



2-p <Ibc fIDcn of tbe Civil Mar 

in coin, except where payment in other forms was 
expressly stipulated in the contract. In 1874, under 
pressure of popular clamor, due to the financial and in- 
dustrial depression which the panic of a year before had 
left behind it, Congress passed a bill to inflate the 
already depreciated paper currency. Grant was urged 
by many of the most influential leaders of his party to 
approve the measure. They assured him of its political 
necessity, predicting defeat for the Republicans at the 
next election should this relief be denied to the people. 
Grant weighed the matter carefully, and decided that 
the measure was unwise and dangerous to the financial 
integrity of the nation. In face of all protests, there- 
fore, and in disregard of all political consequences that 
might flow from his act, he vetoed the bill, sending to 
Congress a message in which he so clearly set forth the 
impolicy of inflation that the legislative body refused 
to override the veto. The effect was even more far- 
reaching than that. The veto put an end, once for all, 
to serious attempts to secure paper inflation, and made 
possible the passage of the Resumption Act and its exe- 
cution four years after Grant's second term expired. 

Grant was also the first President since John Quincy 
Adams's time who made earnest and well directed 
efforts to secure a reform in the civil service by making 
appointments depend upon demonstrated capacity and 
fitness. In these efforts he was without the support 
of any considerable body of opinion, either in Congress 
or in the country. The subject had net been brought 
to the attention of the people. Marcy's dictum that "to 



TIUpsscs Simpson Grant 243 

the victors belong the spoils " had long been accepted 
as an axiom. Grant appears to have had no doctrinaire 
convictions on the subject. He simply saw— plain, 
blunt man of practical sense that he was— that, as he 
expressed it in his message of 1870, "the present sys- 
tem does not secure the best men, and not even fit 
men, for the public service." He wished to change it 
simply in order that the country might be better served 
by a fitter class of men. His efforts to accomplish that 
purpose were balked by congressional and popular in- 
difference, but they served to arouse the public intelli- 
gence and awaken the public conscience on the subject, 
and unquestionably we owe most of the improve- 
ment that has since been wrought to Grant's timely 
initiative. 

In common with all enlightened military command- 
ers, Grant deprecated war as the worst calamity that 
can befall a nation, and his plan for avoiding it was 
that approved by the moral sense of the highest civili- 
zation. At a time when our relations with Great 
Britain were strained almost to the breaking-point, he 
spoke these words of righteousness : "I would deal 
with nations as equitable law requires individuals to 
deal with each other." 

In this spirit Grant sought and secured the settle- 
ment of all differences between the United States and 
Great Britain by arbitration, under a treaty secured 
mainly by the persistent exercise of his masterful in- 
fluence in behalf of peace. The service thus rendered 
to the country and to humanity was incalculably bene- 



244 Sbc flDen of tbc Civil Mar 

ficent at the time, and it furnished to civilized nations 
a precedent of inestimable value. It made an end of 
the old tradition that only by war could a great nation 
secure justice or maintain its prestige. It was the be- 
ginning of that advance in civilization which sought at 
The Hague conference to formulate a system of arbitra- 
tion sufficient to answer all the just purposes of war. 
The old savagery still resists and war is not yet at an 
end ; but important progress has been made since the 
two great English-speaking nations set an exalted ex- 
ample under the provisions o\ the Treaty o\ Washing- 
ton, and they are not optimists or the idle dreamers of 
vain things who hope that the new century, while it is 
yet young, will make of war between great civilized 
states a thing of the past. 

And that preference of peaceful measures to brute 
force which Grant advocated as a principle, he prac- 
tised in the actual conduct of vexed foreign relations. 
The disturbed condition of Cuba and the Spanish 
oppressions there appealed strongly to American 
sympathies, and afforded full justification for armed 
intervention on the part of this country. And when, 
in [873, Spain added insult and injury to the United 
States by the seizure of the American vessel / 'irginius, 
and the deliberate butchery oi ninety Americans, the 
sentiment of the country strongly favored an immediate 
declaration of war. The President stood firmly for 
peace, not by omitting the obvious duty of demanding 
reparation, but by seeking reparation in peaceful instead 
of warlike ways. Haughtily angry as Spain was, and 



TDUpsses Simpson (Brant 245 

vainglorious as to her power, Grant nevertheless suc- 
ceeded by diplomacy in inducing her to make quite all 
the reparation that successful war could have secured. 

During Grant's period of service the work of restor- 
ing the seceding States to the Union was completed ; 
the Kuklux proceedings at the South were repressed ; 
an amnesty bill was passed which restored all but three 
hundred and fifty of the late Confederates to full citizen- 
ship ; a system of refunding the national debt was 
adopted at his suggestion, which resulted in an enor- 
mous reduction of the interest charge ; the heavy taxes 
rendered necessary by war were reduced, and many of 
them abolished, and at the end of his second term he 
quitted office, leaving behind him a record of achieve- 
ment in behalf of his country which might of itself 
have entitled him to fame, had he never been a soldier 
at all. 

Upon his retirement from office, in 1877, General 
Grant made a tour around the world which occupied 
somewhat more than two years. His journey was like 
a royal progress. In every country visited kings, princes, 
and people paid extraordinary homage to him, testify- 
ing, in every imaginable way, the honor in which the 
whole world held him as soldier and statesman. 

Having retired to private life with a scanty fortune, 
he unwisely suffered himself to be drawn into a bank- 
ing partnership with one Ferdinand Ward, who robbed 
and swindled everybody associated with him, and 
when the inevitable catastrophe came in 1884 General 
Grant was left impoverished and in seriously broken 



246 Gbe flDen of tbe Civil Wlar 

health. The public knowledge of his unflinching in- 
tegrity alone saved him from the worse fate of being 
held responsible for his partner's misdeeds. 

The painful malady which a year later ended in his 
death had already seized upon him, but resolutely and 
uncomplainingly he took up the task of providing for his 
family by the writing of a book of Memoirs, and in 
order that this provision for those dear to him might 
not fail he continued his labors upon it even after cease- 
less pain had made existence itself a torture to him. 
Only four days before his death he completed the 
writing, and with it his work in the world. Thus 
to the end those high qualities of patience, endur- 
ance, courage to bear as well as to do, unflinching 
devotion to duty, and unconquerable determination 
which had made him great in the days of his strength 
shone forth undimmed as he approached death in bodily 
anguish but without a murmur of complaint or a sug- 
gestion of self-pity. His greatness of soul endured to 
the end. 



ROBERT EDWARD LEE 



EXALTATION of moral character, unfaltering de- 
votion to duty, as he understood it, measureless 
patience, and a self-control that no stress of cir- 
cumstances could weaken — these were the qualities 
that made Robert Edward Lee great as a man. Of 
those military gifts which in early manhood marked 
him in the eyes of his superiors as the fittest successor 
of General Scott in command of the army, and which 
in the war of 1801-65 secured for him the admiration of 
all men North and South as the foremost soldier and 
strategist on the Southern side, there will be occasion 
to speak later. 

It is not recorded of Lee, or remembered by those 
who were nearest to him, that he ever uttered a com- 
plaint during all the weary struggle against odds of 
numbers and resources, or that he ever excused the 
failure of any of his enterprises by pleading lack of 
means or by casting the responsibility upon others. 
When at Gettysburg his supreme effort came to naught 
because of Longstreet's failure to support Pickett's 
charge with all his force, and because of Ewell's neglect 
247 



248 Zbc flDen of the Civil Mar 

on another part of the field, Lee's countrymen were 
fierce in their censure of these his lieutenants. Lee 
came to their rescue, calmly announcing that he alone 
was responsible for the miscarriage of his plans, thus 
bravely taking all the blame upon himself. And when 
the war was over he sought in no way to excuse his 
defeat. He offered no pleas in abatement of any criti- 
cism that might be made upon his conduct of cam- 
paigns. He said nothing of the odds that had been 
against him. He did not even mention the fact that 
the obstinacy of the Confederate President and cabinet 
had compelled him to hold Richmond when his military 
judgment clearly recognized the necessity of evacuating 
an untenable position and retiring to one where, by 
calling Johnston's army to his aid, he might still have 
hoped to achieve something of success in the field. 
Nor did he ever complain of the sentimentality which 
denied him the privilege of enlisting negroes for the 
defence o\ the Richmond and Petersburg lines, thus 
setting free a part of his veteran forces for campaigns 
northward that would at least have afforded valuable 
possibilities. He wrote no memoirs to explain defeat 
by setting forth the embarrassing restrictions under 
which he was placed, or by fastening upon others their 
fair share of responsibility. He calmly turned to the 
new duties of peace, leaving his fame to such judgment 
as posterity might render, unassisted by any sugges- 
tions or explanations from himself. 

In the matter of descent Lee was born to the best 
He was the son oC' Lighthorse Harry " Lee, Washing- 







Robert Edward I 



fIDen c 









IRobcrt J6bwar& %cc 249 

ton's nearest friend and most trusted subordinate— the 
one man in whom he retained confidence and with 
whom he dared consult when Arnold's treason left him 
in doubt as to the loyalty of all his other lieutenants. 
Lee inherited traditions of the most sensitive honor, 
and with them those qualities of mind and character 
which have been set forth at the beginning of this 
paper as his dominant characteristics. By marriage he 
was closely allied with other families of like traditions 
and character, and in his United States army life the 
esteem in which he was held secured for him all that 
was best in the matter of intimate association. 

Lee was born at Stratford, in Westmoreland County, 
Virginia, on the 19th of January, 1807. He was there- 
fore twenty-two years of age when he was graduated, 
second in his class, from the Military Academy at 
West Point. As an honor man he received a commis- 
sion in the engineer corps, always accounted the best 
in the service, and the one to which only men of 
superior attainments are assigned. During the peaceful 
period that followed, promotion in the army was 
necessarily slow, and of opportunities for purely mili- 
tary distinction, in the engineer corps especially, there 
were next to none. Lee won the regard of his superiors 
however by his masterly work in the improvement of 
rivers and harbors, and nine years after he received his 
first commission as a second lieutenant, he had risen 
to a captaincy. He still held that rank when the 
Mexican War, declared in 1846, brought to him an 
opportunity to exercise his engineering skill in military 



250 £bc flicn of tbe Civil Wav 

ways. Here he soon distinguished himself. General 
Scott frankly attributed the fall of Vera Cruz to Lee's 
ability as an engineer and his conduct as a soldier. He 
was thrice brevetted during that war, the last time to 
the rank of lieutenant-colonel in recognition of his 
services in the storming of Chapultepec. 

In 1SS2 he was selected to command the Military 
Academy at West Point, where he improved and 
extended the course of study and wrought other 
changes of enduring advantage to the institution and 
to military education in America. Three years later 
he was raised to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the 
army and sent to Texas, where he served, with a brief 
interval at the time of John Brown's raid at Harper's 
Ferry, until called to Washington on the approach of 
the Civil War. 

This war brought to Lee the severest ordeal of his 
life — involving at once a conflict of emotions and a con- 
flict of duties. He had always been devoted to the 
Union and to its military service, and in common with 
the majority of Virginians at that time he regarded 
secession as altogether unwise, impolitic, and unneces- 
sary. Yet in common with nearly all Virginians he 
believed firmly in the constitutional right of a State to 
secede from the Union. That doctrine indeed had 
been widely accepted in time past at the North as well 
as at the South, and in certain crises of history many- 
leaders of opinion in New England had seriously con- 
templated its exercise as a remedy for evils which they 
felt to be growing intolerable. In common with such 



IRobcrt je&wart) Xec 251 

men as William C. Wickham and Juhal Early — who in 
the Virginia convention opposed secession to the end, 
but when it was decreed became notable military 
leaders on the Southern side — Lee believed that his 
first and highest allegiance was due to his State, and 
that the act of Virginia in withdrawing from the Union 
was binding upon his conscience. So long as Virginia 
refused to secede he remained in the military service, 
though he declined an offer of the chief command of 
the national armies which was made to him at the 
time. When Virginia adopted an ordinance of secession 
Lee resigned his commission, in great distress of mind, 
under an overmastering sense of duty. 

He wrote a letter at the time to his sister, the wife of 
an army officer in the national service. In it he gave 
the only expression he is known ever to have given, to 
the convictions and sentiments that determined his 
course in the matter. 

"We are now in a state of war," he wrote, "which will yield to 
nothing. The whole South is in a state of revolution, into which 
Virginia, after a long struggle, has been drawn ; and though I 
recognize no necessity for this state of things, and would have for- 
borne and pleaded to the end for redress of grievances, real or 
supposed, yet in my own person I had to meet the question whether 
I should take part against my native State. With all my devotion 
to the Union, and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citi- 
zen, 1 have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand 
against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore re- 
signed my commission in the army, and save in defence of my 
native State, — with the sincere hope that my poor services may 
never be needed — I hope I may never be called upon to draw my 
sword." 

We have here a moving suggestion of the tragedy of 



252 ftbe flDcn of tbe Civil Mar 

that time ; of the heart breaks that were involved in 
events which cruelly set brother against brother ; of the 
perplexity of mind in which officers of Southern birth, 
holding commissions in the regular army, were com- 
pelled to confront a divided and uncertain duty ; for 
Lee's was only one of many cases of the kind. 

As the head of the national army, General Scott 
deeply lamented the loss of Lee. Too old and infirm 
to take the field himself, he had hoped to have Lee as 
his right hand, especially in the work of organizing the 
new levies and converting them into an army fit to take 
the held. He regarded Lee's resignation as a sorer loss 
than those of all the others who had surrendered their 
commissions combined, and pronounced him the ablest 
organizer of military forces in all the land. 

It was to work of that organizing character that Lee 
at once devoted himself on his arrival at Richmond. 
He accepted the command of all the Virginia forces, 
and set to work with diligence to convert the enthu- 
siastic volunteers into drilled and disciplined soldiers. 
A little later, Virginia having joined the Southern Con- 
federacy, the capital was transferred from Montgomery, 
Alabama, to Richmond, and Lee was commissioned as 
one of the five full generals appointed by Mr. Davis. 

He selected the strong strategic position at Manassas 
Junction as the first point of resolute resistance and at 
his suggestion an army under Beauregard was sent 
thither, while another, under Johnston, was concen- 
trated near Winchester in the lower, or northern end of 
the Shenandoah Valley. Lee himself went to the west- 



IRobcrt Et>warci %cc 253 

em part of the State to settle the differences which had 
arisen among the subordinate commanders there and to 
repair the blunders they had made. There were no op- 
portunities for conspicuous service in that quarter and 
for a time Lee was lost to the popular view and his 
fame was obscured by the very dramatic success of 
Johnston and Beauregard at Manassas or Bull Run. 

With the exception of the action near Leesburg, Vir- 
ginia, on the 21st of October, there were no military 
operations of consequence in Virginia during 1 86 1 after 
the battle at Manassas Junction. Johnston was content 
to hold Centreville and Fairfax Court House, with 
strong cavalry outposts on Mason's and Munson's hills 
within sight of Washington, while on the other side, 
McClellan occupied himself with the work of reorgan- 
izing the army which had retreated in panic and dis- 
integration from Bull Run. 

In the autumn a Union force assailed the coast of 
South Carolina and captured the forts at Beaufort and 
near the mouth of the Savannah River, together with 
Hilton Head and other islands of strategic importance. 
For a time it was thought at Richmond that a deter- 
mined winter campaign was to be prosecuted in that 
quarter, and Lee was sent South to prepare the means 
of resistance. As no such campaign was attempted 
Lee was again hidden from view, living mainly in hum- 
ble quarters at the little hamlet of Coosawhatchie. 
with almost no staff and without any of the visible 
indications of high military rank about him. He 
strongly fortified Charleston, Savannah, and the coast 



254 Cbc m>cn of tbe Civil lUar 

between, taking such advantage of the swampy and 
creek-laced country as to make it possible for a very 
small force to defend the Charleston and Savannah 
Railroad against the most determined assaults. So 
well did he do his work that a mere handful of men did 
in tact defend that important line until the very end. 

In March. 1S02, Lee was ordered to Richmond and 
•' under the direction o\ the President " was " charged 
with the conduct of military operations in the armies 
of the Confederacy." That is to say he was in effect 
made Commander-in-chief of all the Southern armies. 
and vested with an authority similar to that conferred 
upon Grant on the other side two years later. But he 
did not immediately take direct command of any army 
or personally take part in field operations. He remained 
in Richmond, directing all the generals in the held in 
the best employment of their forces. 

A little later in the spring McClellan manifested .1 
purpose to advance upon Johnston at Centreville. 
and in accordance with the Fabian policy which he 
always practised. Johnston fell back behind the Rappa- 
hannock, a position which later in the war was recog- 
nized as the best in Northern Virginia for successful 
resistance to armies coming from the direction of Wash- 
ington. But McClellan had no real intention of ad- 
vancing upon Richmond by that route. Instead he 
transferred his base to Fortress Monroe, and marched 
up the peninsula. Johnston met this movement by 
transferring his force to Williamsburg, leaving Jackson 
in the Valley of Virginia and Ewell in command of such 



IRobert jEfcwaro lee 255 

forces as remained on the Rappahannock line. When 
in May McClellan's advance reached Williamsburg 
Johnston fell back to the neighborhood of Richmond. 
McClellan again advanced and established his line upon 
the Chickahominy River. He had an effective force of 
more than 100,000 men, against the much smaller army 
that confronted him, but it was McClellan's habit of 
mind to exaggerate his enemy's strength, and he mis- 
takenly believed himself outnumbered. He therefore 
fortilied and postponed operations to await the arrival 
of McDowell, who with 40,000 men was advancing by 
way of Fredericksburg. 

Lee decided promptly to prevent this reinforce- 
ment. To that end he ordered Ewell, with his whole 
force to move into the valley and join Jackson there, at 
the same time directing Jackson, thus reinforced, to 
drive Banks across the Potomac and threaten Washing- 
ton. This strategy completely succeeded. Apprehen- 
sive for the safety of the capital, the authorities recalled 
McDowell's army for its defence, and McClellan was 
left without the great addition to his strength upon 
which he had confidently counted. 

McClellan's line now lay mainly to the north of the 
Chickahominy, but with a strong force entrenched on 
the southern side of that river. A flood coming, John- 
ston vigorously assailed this force in the hope of crush- 
ing it before assistance could be brought to it across the 
swollen stream. Thus occurred, on the list of May, 
the battle of Seven Pines, or Fair Oaks, as it is variously 
called. 



256 Cbe fIDcn of tbc Civil Hilar 

Johnston was severely wounded in the action, and 
completely disabled for service for many months to 
come. Lee immediately took personal command of the 
army before Richmond, at the same time retaining and 
exercising his authority as Commander-in-chief to direct 
the operations of the other armies of the Confederacy. 
Thus, for the first time, he found himself in direct com- 
mand of an important force in the field, and then began 
that career of battle and strategy which so brilliantly 
demonstrated his superiority to all the other Southern 
commanders in those qualities that bring fame to a 
soldier. 

He set to work at once to dislodge McClellan and 
raise what was in moral effect the siege of Richmond. 
First he sent Stuart with his cavalry on a raid in rear 
of McClellan. in search of information as to the condi- 
tion of the roads and whatever else it might be desirable 
to know. Next he ordered Jackson to move secretly 
from the valley to Ashland on the Fredericksburg Rail- 
road, a dozen or twenty miles northwest of Richmond. 
Lee's plan was to have Jackson advance from Ashland, 
and assail the rear and flank of McClellan's right wing, 
thus uncovering the crossings ; to throw the other 
Confederate corps across as rapidly as possible, and 
concentrate them in McClellan's rear, threatening his 
communications, and compelling him to quit his en- 
trenchments and either accept battle in the open or go 
into retreat. 

There were some miscarriages and delays in the 
execution of the movement, which began on June 20th; 



IRobcrt fi&warfc %cc 257 

but after seven days of continuous marching and 
fighting, McClellan's army was forced back under the 
protection of the gunboats in James River, and his cam- 
paign against Richmond had ended in failure. He had 
saved the credit of his arms, however, by his last 
stand at Malvern Hill, where he repulsed with great 
slaughter the repeated and determined assaults of the 
Confederates. 

But Richmond was not yet safe. McClellan had 
indeed been dislodged, but at Harrison's Landing he 
was still within easy striking distance of the Confed- 
erate capital, and his army was still very strong and 
wholly unbroken in spirit. Moreover, another army 
of considerable proportions, under command of General 
Pope, was advancing, unopposed, by way of Manassas 
Junction to join McClellan. Lee strongly felt the neces- 
sity not only of preventing this junction, but of manag- 
ing in some way, for the sake of moral effect, if for 
nothing else, to transfer the active theatre of war to a 
greater distance from Richmond. 

In attempting this, he reckoned upon the excessive 
concern felt at the North for the safety of Washington. 
If he could manage to threaten that city without losing 
Richmond in the operation, he was confident that Mc- 
Clellan's force would be quickly withdrawn by water 
to the national capital. 

Accordingly, on July nth, Lee ordered Jackson with 
his own and Ewell's commands, to operate in Northern 
Virginia. Jackson moved to Orange Court House, 
and near the end of July Lee sent A. P. Hill's corps to 



258 Sbc fIDcn of tbe Civil Mar 

reinforce him there. Jackson pushed across the river 
and engaged a part of Pope's force at Cedar Mountain, 
on the Qth of August. Two days afterwards he recrossed 
the river to await the reinforcements which Lee was 
hurrying forward from Richmond as rapidly as the 
gradual withdrawal of McClellan's army to protect 
Washington permitted. Having at last transferred 
practically his entire army to the Rapidan, Lee took 
personal command on August 14th. Lee's force slightly 
exceeded Pope's, and it was the plan of the Confederate 
General to attack as soon as dispositions could be made 
to that end. But Pope, discovering his danger, with- 
drew to the stronger defensive line north of the Rappa- 
hannock. Lee moved by his left flank up the river, 
but Pope moved with equal celerity, and at every 
available point had his force strongly posted to resist 
any attempt on Lee's part to force the river. Finally, 
at a point near Warrenton Springs, Lee came to a halt 
and made demonstrations as if tryingto pass the stream 
in face of his resolute adversary. While thus occupy- 
ing Pope's attention, Lee detached Jackson and sent 
him to march around Bull Run Mountain and through 
Thoroughfare Gap to strike the enemy's rear. 

The movement was completely concealed and er 
tirely successful. On the 20th, Jackson reached Man- 
assas Junction and captured Pope's supply depots there. 
Meantime, Lee had sent Longstreet to follow the same 
route and reinforce Jackson, which he did on the 20th. 
Pope had hurriedly retired to protect his communica- 
tions, and, having received reinforcements from Mc- 



•Robert Eo\varc> %cc 259 

Clellan, posted himself to give battle on the same field 
on which the first considerable battle of the war had 
been fought. For two days he assailed Lee's lines 
with all possible vigor, but at the end of that time Lee 
succeeded in driving him across Bull Run to Centreville, 
five or six miles nearer Washington. There Lee turned 
his position and Pope retreated towards Washington. 

Thus within two months, and with a force inferior 
to that of McClellan, Lee had raised the siege of Rich- 
mond, overthrown Pope at the head of another army 
equal to his own in strength, and so manoeuvred as to 
compel the withdrawal of all actively invading forces 
from Virginia. 

He now planned to transfer the scene of operations 
to the northern side of the Potomac. Practically aban- 
doning his base of supplies and planning to subsist his 
army of forty-five thousand men upon the country, he 
passed the Potomac on the sth of September and took 
up a position near Frederick, Maryland, where his pres- 
ence was a threat at once to Washington, Baltimore, 
and the cities farther north. But the strong garrison at 
Harper's Ferry did not withdraw as Lee had expected, 
and as it commanded his route to the Valley of Virginia, 
it was necessary for him to reduce the stronghold be- 
fore continuing his movement in any direction. Accord- 
ingly he sent Jackson back across the Potomac to assail 
Harper's Ferry from the south, while Mc Laws, Walker, 
and D. H. Hill seized and held respectively Mary- 
land Heights, London Heights, and Boonesboro Pass, 
Lee moving with the rest of his army to Hagerstown 



260 Sbc fIDen of tbe Civil Mar 

in search of subsistence. Jackson captured Harper's 
Ferry, with all the stores there and eleven thousand 
men, but meantime the temporary scattering of Lee's 
army in five different bodies was made known to 
McClellan, who was slowly advancing from Wash- 
ington to meet him. Lee had written out for the infor- 
mation of his generals a detailed order setting forth his 
plans of concentration and incidentally revealing the 
fact of his army's temporary dispersal. A copy of this 
order fell into McClellan's hands and that commander 
hastened forward to take advantage of the opportunity 
of crushing his adversary in detail. He assailed D. H. 
Hill at Boonesboro Pass on September 14th, but failed to 
drive him from his position. Lee reinforced Hill and 
during the night withdrew to Sharpsburg or Antietam, 
where two days later he succeeded in concentrating his 
whole force, except A. P. Hill's division. On the 17th 
the two armies met in one of the most fiercely con- 
tested battles of the war. Neither gained a decisive 
victory and for the twenty-four hours after the battle 
they confronted each other, neither venturing to renew 
the contest. But Lee's plan of invasion was foiled, and 
during the night of the 18th the Confederates retired 
across the river and took position at Winchester, Mc- 
Clellan not pursuing them. A month later Lee retired 
to the line of the Rappahannock. 

Thus ended Lee's first campaign in the field. At its 
beginning the Confederate capital was sorely pressed by 
an army of 100,000 men entrenched almost within 
cannon shot of the city. By battle and strategy Lee had 



IRobert Efcwarfc Xee 261 

driven that army away, overthrown Pope at Manassas, 
transferred the seat of war for a time to the other side 
of the Potomac and completely reversed the situation 
so far as it affected the moral conditions on either side. 
But he had been unsuccessful in the decisive battle of 
the campaign, and his plan of invading the North had 
failed. Nevertheless the moral effect of the campaign 
upon the Southern army and people was very great. 
The men of the army had learned almost to idolize their 
leader, and the Southern people's faith in both army 
and leader was without bounds. 

Burnside having succeeded McClellan in command 
of the Army of the Potomac, made his base at Acquia 
Creek on the Potomac and sought to advance upon 
Richmond by way of Fredericksburg thus securing a 
short line and keeping Washington always covered. 
Lee, with 80,000 men, took up a strong position on the 
hills in rear of Fredericksburg and awaited Burnside 's 
attack. Burnside threw about 100,000 men across the 
river, and on the 13th of December hurled his columns 
upon the Confederate lines. The advantage of ground 
was with Lee and even that marvellously determined 
and heroic series of assaults which the national troops 
made upon Marye's Heights failed utterly of effect. After 
a whole day of continuous battling Burnside withdrew 
to the river bank, having lost nearly 1 3,000 men to Lee's 
loss of a little more than 5000. Lee's critics have 
pointed out that as Burnside tarried during the whole 
of the next day on the southern side of the river, and 
had only some frail pontoon bridges as his means of 



262 She flDcn of tbc Civil UHar 

crossing, the Confederate commander might have as- 
sailed him on the bank on the day after the battle, with 
every prospect of crushing or capturing his army. But 
Lee hoped that Burnside would renew the effort to 
carry his works, and was confident of his ability, in 
that event, not only to repel all assaults but to inflict 
the severest punishment at cost of small losses on his 
own part. But after waiting a day, Burnside withdrew 
to the north of the river on the 15th and the military 
operations of [862 were at an end. 

With the comingof the springof 1863 General Hooker, 
who had succeeded Burnside in command of the Army 
of the Potomac, planned a campaign upon new strategic 
lines. His army numbered about 120.000 men while 
Lee's had been reduced by detachments and otherwise 
to about 57,000. It was Hooker's purpose to compel 
Lee to abandon his strong position at Fredericksburg, 
divide his comparatively small force, and accept battle 
in the open held. To that end he ordered Sedgw ick 
with about 50,000 men. to cross the Rappahannock be- 
low Fredericksburg, threatening Lee's right, while with 
the main army he should himself cross the river above 
into the Wilderness and by marching to Chancellors- 
ville, turn the left of the Confederate position. 

These movements were carried out. and Lee. leav- 
ing about 9000 men to hold the works at Fredericks- 
burg against Sedgwick, marched to Chancellorsville 
and met Hooker there at the beginning of May. After 
forcing Hooker's advance back upon the main body 
which had taken a defensive attitude. Lee determined 



"Robert BSowaro Xce 263 

upon the hazardous experiment of dividing his already 
inferior force of 48,000 men in front of his enemy. He 
sent Jackson, with more than two thirds of the army 
to march round Hooker and strike him in Hank and 
rear. Jackson accomplished this movement without 
discovery while Lee, with about 14,000 men, occupied 
the enemy's attention in front. Jackson delivered his 
blow in the late afternoon of May 2d, taking his enemy 
completely by surprise and throwing a part of his line 
into confusion. Jackson receiving a mortal wound, the 
command devolved upon Stuart, who renewed the 
contest the next morning and forced his way to a 
reunion with Lee, who instantly ordered an advance 
of the whole line. The assault was made with such 
impetuosity that Hooker was driven from his position 
and withdrew in some confusion to the banks of the 
river in his rear. Then Lee turned about to meet 
Sedgwick, who had carried the works at Fredericks- 
buig and was marching against the Confederate 
right at Chancellorsville. After a sharp action Sedg- 
wick was pressed to and across the river, and by 
the 6th the whole of Hooker's army had retired to 
the northern bank, to resume position opposite Fred- 
ericksburg. 

At Fredericksburg Lee was still confronted by an 
army greater in numbers than he could hope to make his 
own, even by calling to him every available reinforce- 
ment. It was for him to choose whether he should 
stand on the defensive and await events or should under- 
take a campaign of aggression in an effort to remove 



264 Sbe flDen of tbc Civil Mar 

the seat of active warfare to a region farther from Rich- 
mond. He decided upon the latter course. But as in 
the case of his dealing with McClellan. it was necessary 
to proceed cautiously so as not to uncover Richmond 
to an army strong enough to capture that city if 
unopposed by any force except the meagre garrison 
there. His plan was to threaten Washington as he 
had done before and thus compel the Army o( the 
Potomac to retire from its advanced position and 
defend the capital. 

In pursuance of this plan he first detached Ewell 
and sent him to the Shenandoah Valley with orders 
to drive out the national forces there under Milroy. 
As soon as he thought it prudent to do so he de- 
tached Longstreet to march northward east of the 
Blue Ridge. By this time the menace to Washington 
was so serious that Hooker withdrew from the Rappa- 
hannock and fell back upon the capital, precisely as 
Lee had expected and intended. Lee immediately 
sent his remaining corps, under A. P. Hill, to join 
Ewell and ordered Longstreet also to cross into the 
valley. Thence the whole Confederate force was 
pushed across the Potomac, arriving at Chambers- 
burg and Carlisle in Pennsylvania, on the 27th of 
June. 

Stuart, with the cavalry, had been ordered to ob- 
serve the enemy, but. after his habit. Lee had left much 
to the discretion of the cavalry leader, and. acting under 
one of his dramatic impulses. Stuart made a spectacular 
raid around Washington. He left Lee. in the mean- 



"Robert Eowaro Xee 265 

time, without that information as to the movements of 
the Union army, which he sorely needed as a guide to 
his own operations. The result was that while his 
army was stretched out in a long and partially dis- 
jointed column, the unsupported head of it stumbled 
upon the advance of the Army of the Potomac, now un- 
der Meade, at Gettysburg, where Lee, in the absence 
of his cavalry, had not expected to find any force more 
formidable than a division or so of mounted men. An 
attempted reconnoissance quickly brought on a general 
engagement. Thus, reversing the usual practice of 
war, the assailing, instead of the defending, army was 
taken by surprise. Lee hurried his widely separated 
forces forward as rapidly as possible, but meantime 
Meade had succeeded in establishing himself with his 
entire army in a strong position. For three days, July 
1 st, 2d, and id, there raged the most hotly contested 
and bloodiest battle of modern times. At the end of 
that time both armies were badly crippled, and after 
passing a day of inactivity on the held, Lee retired 
to Virginia almost unmolested in his retreat. Thus 
his second invasion of the North was brought to 
naught, as the first had been, by a battle technically 
undecisive. In this case, as in the Antietam cam- 
paign, however, the moral advantage rested with the 
Northern arms. Lee had not been defeated in action, 
but he had been balked of his purpose. His army was 
not broken or overthrown, but it had completely failed 
to accomplish the objects for which it had crossed the 
Potomac. 



266 Gbe fIDcn of tbe Civil Mar 

The opposing armies returned to the line of the 
Rapidan, and although it was scarcely past mid-summer 
when they sat down to face each other there, neither 
commander ventured upon a further campaign during 
that year. 

In the spring of 1864 General Grant was made com- 
mander of all the national armies. He conceived a new 
plan for prosecuting the war to a successful end. He 
saw clearly that the vitality of Southern resistance lay 
in the fighting strength of the Southern armies rather 
than in the possession of cities or strategic positions. 
The Confederate strength was much broken in the west 
and the material resources of the cotton States were 
practically exhausted. But Lee remained with the 
Army of Northern Virginia at his back, and Grant clearly 
understood that there could be no successful issue of 
the war until this force should be crushed. As he him- 
self expressed it, he determined to make Lee's army, 
rather than Richmond, the sole "objective" of the 
campaign, not only in Virginia but in all quarters of the 
South. He ordered Sherman to operate against John- 
ston at Atlanta, and directed other commanders in 
other parts of the South to maintain ceaseless activity 
as a means of preventing Lee's reinforcement. Then 
placing himself at the head of the Army of the Potomac, 
he began the task he had set himself, of crushing the 
power of Lee. Instead of seeking an easy approach to 
Richmond, he sought the shortest road to Lee's army. 
Crossing the Rapidan on the 4th of May, with about 
120,000 men, he marched into the Wilderness where 



■Robert Eowaro %cc 267 

Lee with 66,000 effective men promptly assailed him. 
After a severe struggle there, Grant moved by his left 
flank to the neighborhood of Spottsylvania Court House, 
where Lee, moving on a parallel line, confronted him 
again in another prolonged and stubbornly contested 
battle. Grant continued his plan of moving by the left 
Hank, and at Cold Harbor he again found Lee strongly 
posted behind improvised earthworks. Here Grant 
made a desperate assault, which was repelled with ter- 
rible slaughter, Lee's loss being inconsiderable. Re- 
suming his flank march. Grant sat down before 
Petersburg about the middle of June and began a siege 
of that city which was plainly the master-key to Rich- 
mond. From that time until April, 180s, the struggle 
of the giants was continued night and day without 
ceasing. By continually extending his line to the left 
and pushing it forward, Grant compelled Lee to stretch 
his army out to attenuation, and at last the Union 
forces crossed the Weldon Railroad leading from Peters- 
burg, south. 

The time had now come when military prudence 
prompted Lee to abandon Petersburg and Richmond, 
and by retreating toward the southwest, to form a junc- 
tion with Johnston, who had been driven out of At- 
lanta and was now being driven slowly northward by 
Sherman's advance from Savannah through the Caro- 
linas. But Lee was not permitted to act in this matter 
as his judgment dictated. The authorities at Richmond 
obstinately insisted upon holding that city and Peters- 
burg. Thus Lee had no choice but to remain in his 



268 Cbe flDcn of tbc Civil War 

works, fighting desperately, and awaiting the inevitable 
end with that unfaltering patience which was always a 
dominant trait of his character. 

At the beginning of April, 1865, the end came. 
Grant broke through Lee's right wing, south of Peters- 
burg, compelling the hasty evacuation of that city and 
Richmond, and rendering futile in advance any attempt 
that Lee might make to retreat. For at every step 
Grant's cavalry were in front of the Confederates while 
his infantry and artillery ceaselessly operated upon his 
left flank, pressing him back toward the upper James 
River, a direction which afforded him no road of es- 
cape. On the Qth of April, at Appomattox Court House, 
Lee surrendered what remained of his famous army, 
and the war was in effect ended. 

Without a murmur or any attempt to shift the blame 
of failure, though that task offered tempting oppor- 
tunities, Lee retired to private life, earnestly setting 
his face against all attempts to continue the struggle 
by irregular war, and urgently advising the men who 
had so unfalteringly followed him in war, to betake 
themselves at once to the pursuits of peace. 

At the beginning of the war, Lee had been well-to- 
do. Its end found him impoverished, and, of course, 
without hope of employment in his profession there- 
after. 

He accepted the presidency of Washington College 
(now Washington and Lee University), and occupied 
himself with the teaching and training of young men 
until his death, on the 12th of October, 1870. 



IRobert lEbwarfc %ce 



269 



He was, without question, the greatest soldier that 
the Southern cause produced, and his exalted personal 
character is held in the highest esteem at the North, 
while among the people of the South his memory is 
cherished with passionate affection and reverence. 




DAVID GLASGOW FARRAGUT 



DAVID GLASGOW FARRAGUT was the first 
man who ever held the rank of Admiral in 
the United States Navy. He was also the last 
survivor of that " old school" of naval officers who, as 
he once described them. " entered the navy through a 
port hole instead of a cabin door."— officers who, be- 
ginning sea service in childhood, made themselves 
masters of seamanship first, and added scholarly attain- 
ments afterward, when opportunity offered. He entered 
the navy when only a little over nine years of age, 
distinguished himself at twelve as a capable navigator 
and resolute commander, and died Admiral, after sixty 
years o\ devoted and distinguished service. In the 
meantime, by his courage, his masterful skill, and his 
almost matchless determination he had added more to 
the glory of the American sea service than any other 
one man ever did before or after him. 

He was the son of an old revolutionary patriot and 
soldier, who had settled as a pioneer in Tennessee. 
When Farragut was born, on July 5, 1801. the Tennes- 
see country was still the haunt of hostile Indians. His 



David Glasgow Farragut 

From a steel engraving 



2)av>io (Blasoow jfarraout 271 

father labored diligently to inspire the boy with courage 
and that unflinching devotion to duty which distin- 
guished every act of his arduous life, but beyond this 
instruction in manliness the lad was without education. 
He was orphaned when, at the age of eight years, he 
was adopted by Commodore Porter — the great Com- 
modore of that name— who promised him a career. 

The untrained backwoods boy was taken by sea to 
Washington, and put into a school ; but scant time 
was allowed him in which to acquire even the slender- 
est rudiments of education ; for when he was only nine 
and a half years of age he received his warrant as a 
midshipman, and began the active work of his life. He 
presently went to sea in the Essex, Porter's Hag-ship, 
and was trained in seamanship during the summer, and 
sent to school whenever opportunity offered in the 
winter. 

Presently the war with Great Britain came, and 
young Farragut went with Porter on his successive 
cruises, winning special approbation by his sagacity 
and alertness. Soon Porter sailed into the Pacific to 
make that matchless cruise against British commerce 
which marked him at once as the foremost officer of 
the navy. He captured so many rich prizes that pres- 
ently he found himself without an available officer to 
whom to entrust a captured ship that must be navi- 
gated to Valparaiso, fifteen hundred miles away. In 
this stress of circumstance he determined to put his 
midshipman Farragut — a lad only twelve years of age 
—in command of the ship, with instructions that her 



:-: Cbe flDen of tbe Civil tUar 

prisoner captain should serve the boy as navigating' 
officer. It was a stupendous responsibility to place 
upon a boy still scarcely more than a child, but young 
Farragut had shown such capacity of command that 
Porter accepted the risk, and placed the little midship- 
man on the quarter deck, with instructions to sail the 
ship to Valparaiso and there enter her as a prize. 
Surely such a task had never before been committed to 
so young a person, and the compliment implied was 
without precedent. But Farragut was worthy of the 
trust reposed in him. His masterful spirit and his alert- 
ness of mind, rose to the opportunity of distinction thus 
thrust upon him. The captured captain resented his 
subjection to a boy's command, of course, and refus- 
ing to obey orders, went below for his pistols. There- 
upon Farragut himself assumed all responsibility, 
undertook to navigate the ship himself, and ordered 
the captain to remain below under penalty o\ being 
shot should he attempt to make his appearance on 
Having thus made the captain a close prisoner, 
the boy took complete control of the ship and sailed 
her. unaided, into the prize port. 

Remarkable as his seamanship was proved by this 
exploit to be. it was a matter of small consequence in 
comparison with his demonstrated resolution, readi- 
ness, and sound judgment in dealing with the human 
difficulty of a mutinous navigating officer poss 
of every advantage in the contest of wits and courage. 
From the hour in which he sailed into Valparaiso, the 
navy recognized this lad as one destined to achieve the 



E>aviJ> Glasgow jfarrafliu 273 

highest things and win the highest honors. Only a 
hostile shot could mar the career that lay so plainly 
before the wonderful boy. 

Two years later Farragut saw his first severe sea 
battle, that in which Porter, in the Essex, fought two 
English war-ships, in one of the bloodiest and most 
severely contested struggles of the entire war. In this 
as in the less dangerous service which he had before 
known, the youth acquitted himself with distinction. 
He was now recognized not only as a person of un- 
usual readiness of mind and devotion to duty, but as a 
competent navigator and a fighter of high courage and 
exceeding self-possession. But he still lacked the 
technical training of the schools, and when the war 
ended his mentor, Commodore Porter, sent him to 
Chester, Pennsylvania, for instruction in book lore and 
for systematic training in the school of the soldier. 
There was no Annapolis Naval Academy at that time. 

The war with Algiers having broken out, Farragut 
was again taken from his books in 18 is and sent on 
service to the Mediterranean. In iS 17-18 Farragut 
lived in the consulate at Tunis, in order to perfect him- 
self in his knowledge of the French and Italian languages, 
and to learn somewhat of mathematics, commercial 
affairs, international law, and whatever else it might 
become a rising young naval officer to know. Inci- 
dentally, also, he attended grand balls and learned 
something of the manners of polite society, with which 
he had not before been brought into contact, but in 
which his unvarying courtesy and kindliness quickly 



274 tlbc flDen of tbc Civil Mar 

commended him, especially to queenly women who 
took pains to cultivate him out of his inexperienced 
awkwardness of demeanor, and to convert his em- 
barrassed self-consciousness into an easy self-confi- 
dence. Thus, little by little, and in fragmentary, 
haphazard ways, did Farragut acquire that education 
which in the end made him the most accomplished as 
well as the greatest of American naval commanders. 

So marked were his gifts at this time that the 
consul at Tripoli, in a prophetic letter, spoke of him as 
''the young admiral " a prediction which seemed then 
impossible of fulfilment as the rank of admiral was not 
only unknown in our naval service, but was deemed 
too aristocratic ever to be created by a vote of Congress. 
Yet it was reserved to Farragut to render such service 
to his country as to compel the creation of that supreme 
rank as the only and still insufficient recognition of his 
deeds in the country's behalf. 

From this early period until 1840-47 was a time of 
peace. Farragut's service during that part of his life 
embraced many voyages, much study, afloat and ashore, 
and an eager effort at every point to improve himself. 
In regular course he rose to the rank of commander, 
and when the war with Mexico came he sought and 
obtained a commission of active service. But, as he 
believed and asserted in letters to the Navy Department, 
he "encountered the ill will of his commodore." At 
any rate he was denied all opportunities of fruitful 
service, and after a time, at his own request, was 
ordered home. 



Bavufc Glasgow Jfarraout 275 

In 1 8S4 Farragut asked to be sent to the Crimea, for 
purposes of observation, but was denied the commis- 
sion. He had long been in bad odor among the 
civilians who, strangely enough, have always domi- 
nated that purely military department to its sore detri- 
ment. He was sent to the Pacific coast instead, to 
select, fortify, and equip a naval station. Mare Island 
was the satisfactory result of his labors during the next 
four years. 

The Civil War brought perplexity to Farragut, as it 
did to other officers of the army and navy who were 
men of Southern birth. It presented a problem of 
divided allegiance. Farragut solved it, not as Lee did 
by going with his State, but as George H. Thomas and 
Winfield Scott did by adhering to the Union. He 
unhesitatingly declared that if peaceable secession 
should be accomplished, as many persons North and 
South then believed might happen, he would resign 
from the national service and go with the South in 
which he had been born, and in which all his kinships, 
whether by birth or marriage lay. But if the disruption 
should involve war, he understood it to be his impera- 
tive duty to sacrifice all other ties and bear true allegi- 
ance to the National Government which had given him 
his education, and all his life long had provided him 
with employment which it had rewarded with honor 
and promotion. He was living at Norfolk on waiting 
orders, during the trying winter of 1860-61. He 
strongly sympathized with the efforts made to keep 
Virginia out of the secession movement and for many 



2-6 £bc flDcn of tbc Civil IClar 

months had reason to believe that these efforts would 
be successful to the end. But when, in April, 1S01, 
Virginia was — in his phrase — "dragooned out of the 
Union," he went North to await the call of duty. 

It was not until the end of i So i that the call of duty 
came. Then he was placed in command of an expedi- 
tion designed to reduce New Orleans and reopen the 
Mississippi to navigation. At the beginning of Feb- 
ruary, i $02, he sailed from Hampton Roads in command 
of a fleet in whose efficiency he had not the smallest 
confidence. His flag-ship was the Hartford, destined, 
under his command, to become one of the great his- 
toric vessels of the navy— a fit companion of the Con- 
stitution and the Constellation. 

His orders were peculiar. His mission was to "re- 
duce the defences " of New Orleans and possess 
himself of that city. As if doubting his devotion or his 
skill or his determination or something else, the depart- 
ment instructed him, almost menacingly, to achieve 
success and offer no excuses for failure. " As you have 
expressed yourself," the orders ran, " perfectly satisfied 
with the force given to you, and as many more power- 
ful vessels will be added before you can commence 
operations, the department and the country require of 
you success. " 

Farragut neither resented the extraordinary tone of 
his orders nor shrank from the task they set him, with 
an insulting intimation that failure to accomplish that 
very difficult duty to the satisfaction of the ill-informed 
civilians of the Navy Department would mean discredit 



Bavnfc (Slasgow jfarragut 277 

and bring rebuke upon him as its consequence. He 
knew, as they did not, the insufficiency of his means. 
He knew, as they did not and could not, the difficulty 
of getting his ships over shallow bars and through 
narrow passes into the Mississippi. He knew, as they 
did not, the extraordinary character of the defences 
that the Confederates had established below New Or- 
leans, defences that must still confront him as almost 
insuperable obstacles after he should get such of his 
ships as he could over the bars and through the passes. 
In short, he knew how desperate was the enterprise 
set for his accomplishment, and how calumniously he 
would be criticised by official authority should he in 
any degree fail to meet the extravagant expectations of 
ignorant over-confidence. 

A lesser man than he, a man less sincerely devoted 
to patriotic purposes, a man of smaller moral courage, 
a man less capable of heroic self-sacrifice, would have 
refused the commission, or at the least, would have 
accepted it under strenuous protest. Farragut set to 
work instead to do all that skill and courage and heroic 
determination could do to fulfil the mission entrusted 
to his hands. He collected all the ships that were 
available for the purpose — many of them utterly unfit 
for such a service and not one of them such as it would 
now be deemed proper to employ in an enterprise so 
difficult. He took with him an army under Butler, with 
which to occupy New Orleans when it should surren- 
der. But for his own purposes that army was of no 
use. It could not be employed in the reduction of the 



278 Gbc flDen of tbc Civil Mar 

river defences, or be brought into any use whatever 
until the work of his campaign should be fully done. In 
the meantime its presence was a clog upon his move- 
ments, its care a heavy burden to him. 

Thus equipped Farragut sailed for the mouths of the 
Mississippi early in February. It was not until the 
middle of April that he succeeded in dragging his ships 
over mud bars into the river. One of them— among 
the most efficient— he could not force past the bars 
at all. 

Once in the river, this was his situation. He had 
sixteen wooden sloops of war ; sixteen wooden gun- 
boats ; twenty-one frail wooden schooners, each carry- 
ing only one mortar, the efficiency of which was gravely 
doubtful ; and five other vessels of varying character. 
He had a little over 200 guns in all, big and little, effec- 
tive and of very doubtful efficiency. 

Opposed to him were the defensive works of the 
Confederates, the fruit of long months of exertion and 
of the most masterful engineering skill. At a point 
where the river narrowed to half a mile and made a 
sharp bend in its course, there stood two strong, and 
heavily armed fortresses commanding every inch of the 
river above and below, and able to deliver a concen- 
trated fire of many tons per second upon any approach- 
ing enemy. The two forts were armed with about 1 is 
guns, mostly thirty-two pounders — a weapon deemed 
capable of instantly sinking any wooden ship against 
which its missiles might be directed. Well below these 
forts there were two iron chains stretched across the 



©avufc (Slasgow jfarraout 279 

stream guarded by sharp-shooters and supported by- 
vessels anchored there for the purpose. Above lay a 
Confederate fleet of fifteen sail, including an iron-pro- 
tected floating battery, heavily armed and an iron-clad, 
steam-propelled ram, capable of instantly sinking any 
craft with which her steel-shod prow might come into 
contact. 

In spite of all Farragut advanced to the attack after 
a six days' bombardment with the mortars, which had 
not proved as effective as the Navy Department had 
anticipated, but as Farragut, with his larger knowledge 
and greater skill had not. He wearied at last of this 
ineffectual fire, and of the constant difficulty he had in 
warding off Confederate tire-rafts, and protecting his 
own vessels against collisions in the narrow confines of 
the river. He therefore gave orders for a determined 
attack. First of all he cut the chains that obstructed 
the passage. Next he " fortified " his ships, as it were, 
by adroitly disposing of their coal and their chain cables 
in such fashion as should best protect their boilers and 
machinery. Then he ordered a general advance which 
was begun before daylight on the morning of April 24. 
1862. 

Under a " fire of Hell " his fleet forced its way past 
the forts — all but three vessels which were disabled in 
the attempt. Then came " the River Fight," as a poet 
has named it, with the Confederate fleet. It was a brief 
but very bloody action, in which deeds were done on 
both sides that might well claim place in those pages 
which history specially reserves for the recording of the 



280 Zhc fll>cn of the Civil HWar 

most heroic of human achievements — those pages to 
which poets turn for inspiration when minded to sing 
their most sonorous songs. 

When the Confederate fleet was destroyed there re- 
mained the defences immediately below the city to be 
overcome. Against these Farragut hurled all his force, 
and on the morning of April 25th, he anchored in front 
of the now defenceless city of New Orleans, the city in 
which as a child he had been adopted into the navy and 
set into the way of that great career which thus culmi- 
nated in astounding glory where it had begun in feeble, 
boyish hope. 

Farragut desired to go on with his work in a sen- 
sible way. He asked permission to sail at once to 
Mobile, and reduce that city's defences as he had 
reduced those of New Orleans. His idea was identical 
with that which inspired Grant's campaign of 1864 — 
namely, that the only way to bring the war to a speedy 
end was to break the power of Confederate resistance 
at those points where that power afforded the greatest 
strength to the Confederate cause. There were block- 
ade runners making trips with almost packet-like regu- 
larity into and out of every Confederate port south of 
Albemarle Sound. The South was marketing its 
cotton and buying its supplies in the Bahamas and the 
West Indies, and obviously no blockading fleet, how- 
ever strong, could put an end to a traffic from which 
Southern resistance largely drew its material resources. 
In order to stop that traffic and make the blockade 
effective as a means of cutting off the South at once 



Davifc Glasgow tfarracjut 281 

from its market and its source of supplies, Farragut 
desired to reduce every Confederate port to national 
control as he had done with New Orleans. Without 
doubt his policy was the wisest, the most humane, and 
altogether the best that could then inspire and direct 
naval enterprise. It would have shortened the war by 
a year at the least, and it would have saved lives by 
scores of thousands and treasure by hundreds of mil- 
lions. But the time was not yet ripe for such wise 
direction of the war as Grant w;is to give it in 1854. 
The civilians in control of the bureaus at Washington 
had more dramatic effects in mind, and in aid of these 
they compelled Farragut to waste time and strength 
and precious lives in a fruitless running of batteries at 
Vicksburg and Port Hudson where, as was obvious 
to his educated mind, the breaking of Confederate 
resistance could be accomplished only by the land 
operations under Grant — operations that neither 
needed nor could profit by the perilous exposure of 
the navy at a time when it might have been more 
advantageously employed in the reduction of Con- 
federate ports. 

After the opening of the Mississippi, there came a 
period of inaction to Farragut. The Navy Department 
was not yet ready to grasp his ideas and permit him to 
carry them into execution. At last, in the summer of 
1864, more than two years after he had proposed the ex- 
pedition, he was permitted to assail Mobile. With a fleet 
consisting in part of wooden vessels and in part of iron- 
clads, commanded from the bridge of his flag-ship 



282 Zbe flDcn of tbe Civil Mar 

Hartford, he undertook the reduction of the Mobile 
defences and the closing of the sole remaining Gulf 
port of consequence. 

The assault was begun early in the morning of 
August 5, 1864. The port was defended by strongly 
armed forts, by a formidable fleet, and by a torpedo- 
strewn harbor. Into these "jaws of death" Farragut 
pushed his way. One of his ironclads ran foul of a 
torpedo, was blown up and sank to the bottom. Pres- 
ently the Brooklyn, which preceded the flag -ship, 
stopped her engines. Farragut shouted inquiries as to 
the cause. The answer was that torpedoes lay just 
ahead. Then it was that Farragut gave his celebrated 
order — "Go on. Damn the torpedoes." Instantly 
he pushed his flag-ship past the Brooklyn and himself 
took the perilous lead. 

Inside the bay Farragut was vigorously assailed by 
the Confederate fleet, whose officers and men mani- 
fested a determination as strong and a courage as reck- 
less as his own. But the fire of his ironclads and the 
activity of his other vessels were presently crowned 
with victory, and about nightfall his perilous task was 
done. The forts, cut off from their communications, 
surrendered a few days later, and the harbor of Mobile 
was completely within control of the Federal authori- 
ties. The city itself was inaccessible by reason of 
shoal water, but the purposes of the expedition were 
accomplished to the full. The cost in life and in ships 
was very great — much greater than the damage in- 
flicted upon the Confederates. But the victory was 



E>avrt> Glasgow Jfarraout 283 

well worth all the sacrifice that had been exacted as 
the price of it 

This " Bay Fight" was the crowning achievement 
of Farraguts life and the last battle in which he ever 
engaged. In failing health he returned to the North, 
where every honor that ingenious popular gratitude 
could devise was heaped upon him. Congress had 
already revived the rank of Rear-Admiral for his reward 
and the President had conferred it upon him. Later 
Congress created the still more exalted rank of Admiral, 
previously unknown in the American Navy, and he was 
made supreme commander of our sea forces, with that 
" sea lord " rank which knows no superior in the naval 
service of any nation. A few years of peaceful and en- 
joyable life were left to him as the rich reward of a 
lifetime of strenuous and most heroic service. On the 
14th of August, 1870, he was gathered to his fathers. 



THE MEN OF LETTERS 



WASHINGTON IRVING 



WASHINGTON IRVING had long passed the 
psalmist's life limit of three score years 
and ten when he died in [859. All the 
work for which he is held in loving remembrance was 
done during the first half of the nineteenth century. 
Yet there is to-day in a new century no figure fresher 
in our literary annals, no American writer who in this 
dawn of the twentieth century holds a larger or securer 
place than he does in the admiration and the affection 
of those who read books to find in them a reflection of 
human nature. 

In several respects Irving's position in literature is 
unique. He was the first of American creative writers 
in point of time, as he was and still remains foremost 
in achievement. Brockden Brown did indeed precede 
Irving, but during his brief career he struck no distinc- 
tively American note, and his works are to-day forgot- 
ten except that here and there a scholar turns over 
their yellowed pages with archaic interest concerning 
aspirations born before their time. It was Irving who 
first put aside the copy books of English literature and 
2S7 



288 ftbe flDcn of Xcttcrs 

ventured to write in a hand that was all his own. It 
was he who first discovered the literary possibilities of 
American life and history, and who turned them to 
largest account as the materials of original, creative 
work. In advance of all others he wrought the dust 
of our annals into plastic clay, fashioned from it creatures 
of his own imagining and breathed into their nostrils 
the breath of life. 

He, first among Americans, created enduring human 
types, or, more properly, human individuals, so per- 
fectly fashioned and so vital that they must always 
seem to men of sense as actual as the personages of 
history. If this be. as critics have always taught, the 
ultimate test of creative genius in literature, then we 
may without offence use the superlative and call Irving 
the very greatest of American men of letters, so long at 
least as Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane survive in 
the memory of men, and so long as the proper name 
Knickerbocker endures as an accepted adjective of the 
English language. 

If this were all, Hawthorne at least might dispute 
with Irving the first place in our literature. But it is 
not all. Irving's achievements were by no means con- 
fined to a local or even an American field. Much of 
his best work was devoted to quite other than American 
subjects. We are indebted to him for the best and 
fairest and most winning interpretations of English life 
that are accessible to us. To him we owe, more than 
to any other writer, our capacity to appreciate the 
romance of old Spain, and it was from him that we 



Washington Irving 

Leslie, R, 



Zbe flDen of 1 












Wasbinoton flrvino 289 

learned practically all that, as a people, we know of 
Mahomet and the Moors and the wars that rescued 
Europe from the grasp of the Saracens. It was he who 
first read the riddle of Columbus's life and character, 
and made alive to our comprehension the times in 
which the discoverer lived, and the conditions under 
which his work for the world was done. 

If Irving had done nothing except revivify the old 
Dutch life of New York, as he did, his rank in American 
letters would have been among the foremost of our 
creative writers. If he had never done that work at 
all, but had given us only his pictures of English life, 
his prose poems of old Spain, and his Columbus and 
Mahomet, he would still have been ranked among our 
best. 

His grasp was vastly greater than Hawthorne's and 
his human sympathies immeasurably more catholic 
and comprehensive. He was less subtle and more 
human ; less mystical and more wholesome ; less intro- 
spective and more healthfully observant. 

He was a man of the world. He loved association 
with his fellow-men, and sought it all his life with an 
eager and natural interest in every manifestation of 
human character. He looked upon human conduct 
with an amused mind, but always with understanding 
and full sympathy. He was not only in the world, but 
of it. He shared its impulses and its points of view. 
His habit of mind was to look " out and not in, up and 
not down," and to be inimitably tolerant of folly and 
frailty, as one who felt himself easily capable of both. 



2go Gbe fiDen of letters 

He himself used to tell with delight how he once 
joined forces with a predator)' urchin and spent a de- 
lightful afternoon in helping the young freebooter steal 
his own apples from the orchard at Sunnyside. His in- 
tensely human instincts were illustrated in many ways. 
He loved life in Spain for the sake of its grace and dignity 
of bearing, but still more because of the black-eyed 
beauties who charmed him in that country by their 
winsome coquetry. His most intimate friend, the late 
Mr. George P. Putnam, used to relate how on one 
occasion he discovered a very lovable human weakness 
in Irving. Looking over his friend's library. Mr. Putnam 
found it sadly overloaded with ■"trash," and with 
Irving's permission he undertook to purge it. But 
when he had sorted out the worthless books, Irving 
came to their rescue with a plaintive plea for them as 
old and loved friends. This book might be the veriest 
trash— probably it was so— but Irving remembered how 
it had solaced his loneliness once at a country inn. and 
could not think o\ parting with it. Another was non- 
sense, of course, but it reminded Irving of the delightful 
days at sea. when he had idly turned its pages the 
while he sat at the masthead, and the sailors below 
whistled for a wind. And so throughout the list. 
Irving- found in each worthless volume some associa- 
tion that made it precious to him. Mr. Putnam might 
send all his collection of worthy and respectable books 
to the auction-room, if he liked, but these dear old 
trashy and altogether worthless friends of his wander- 
ing life he would not part with on any account. The 



TKHaebington Annuo 291 

incident illustrates a characteristic of Irving which went 
far to give to his writings their winsomeness, their ex- 
traordinary capacity to enlist the affectionate sympathy 
of the reader— his capacity, to wit, to appreciate the 
lovable in the unimportant. 

In this characteristic we discover the chief charm of 
all of Irving's writings. He always wrote with a sym- 
pathy that awakened sympathy. He took his reader 
by the arm, as it were, and told him his stories in full 
confidence that his reader would enjoy hearing them, 
as in truth the reader always did and still does. 

It was a very notable achievement for Irving to ac- 
complish this. He wrote at a time when youths were 
taught that if they would write well they must give 
their days and nights to Addison ; a time when dignity 
of literary style was more highly regarded than interest 
of subject or of treatment in literature ; when the round- 
ing of a period was deemed of greater consequence than 
the provoking of the reader to smiles or tears. The fatal 
facility of literary stilt-walking still appealed strongly 
to men who ventured into print in the early part of the 
nineteenth century, and living's success in avoiding 
that temptation to stumbling was by no means the least 
notable of his achievements, or the least conclusive 
proof we have of the spontaneity of his genius. 

Irving used, laughingly, to boast that he was the 
only man of his time who had been born in New York 
City. "All the rest," he said, "came early and re- 
mained." The boast was not quite true, but at least it 
reflected Irving's intense feeling of loyalty to his native 



292 £be fIDcn of Xettcrs 

city — a feeling that endured through all his long wan- 
derings abroad and was never in the least weakened by 
the delight he took in life in older lands. 

He was born in a house in William Street, between 
Fulton and John, on April 1, 1783. His father was a 
seafaring man who had settled himself in a mercantile 
business in New York. This father was fairly well to 
do, highly respectable, a rigid disciplinarian in his own 
family, a stern religionist, and during the American 
Revolution an uncompromising patriot, a fact which 
echoed itself in the name bestowed upon the son whose 
unimagined fame was destined to make his own person- 
ality remembered. 

The mother of Washington Irving seems to have 
been a woman of rare good sense and of a gentle, lov- 
ing disposition. Without doubt her influence was more 
potent than the father's stern uprightness in forming the 
character of the boy. 

It is an interesting fact that the elder Irving was care- 
ful to give his two elder and quite unimportant sons a 
college education, and that Washington, the only mem- 
ber of the family who was possessed of high intellectual 
gifts, was left with scarcely any education at all. He 
rather irregularly attended such schools as there were 
in the neighborhood, acquired little of what their mas- 
ters could teach, and at the age of sixteen quitted school 
finally. He entered, nominally at least, upon the study 
of law in the office of an attorney, but gave small atten- 
tion to his text-books. He preferred more interesting 
literature than the law of inheritance or the authorities 



Washington Irving 293 

on reversions and remainders could furnish, and accord- 
ingly he read all the books of a literary character that 
fell in his way. At this time, too, he manifested his in- 
clination to literary pursuits by contributing light articles 
of his own to the newspapers of the day. His health 
was not strong, — indeed he manifested symptoms of 
pulmonary trouble which aroused a good deal of 
anxiety on the part of his family, and in 1804 he was 
sent to Europe for his health. During the next two 
years he enjoyed to the full the delights of society, 
the theatre, and bohemia generally, on the continent 
and in England. On his return he projected his first lit- 
erary venture, Salmagundi, which he conducted in 
conjunction with his brother William and James K. 
Paulding. 

It was at this period of his life that sorrow for the 
first time fell heavily upon his sensitive nature. His 
betrothed, a daughter of Judge Hoffman, was a young 
woman, by all accounts, of extraordinary charm, and 
Irving's love for her was extreme. When she fell ill 
and at last died with her lover by her bedside, a shadow 
fell upon Irving's soul which was never completely lifted 
while he lived. He did not grow morbid, indeed,— his 
mind was too soundly healthful for that. He preserved 
his interest in life, and after a time all his old relish for 
human association returned, with its abounding sym- 
pathy, its keen capacity for enjoyment, and its gentle, 
humorous tolerance of faults and foibles. But, with all 
his strongly domestic instincts and with his unusual 
opportunities in the choice of a wife, he never married. 



294 Gfoc fll>en of letters 

Nevertheless in his bachelorhood there was no touch 
of woman-hating, no slightest abatement of the rever- 
ence and chivalric tenderness with which he regarded 

womankind. His spirit was deeply wounded by the 
blow that fate had dealt him. but it was not soured or 
otherwise perverted. Sorrow seems, indeed, rather to 
have sweetened and ennobled his character, fitting him 
in peculiar fashion for the best doing of the work that lay 
before him in life. If this point seems too much dwelt 
upon in this place, it is because o\ its importance as a 
factor in the career that we are studying. Creative 
literature must o\ necessity be largely a reflection, a 
revelation of the man who writes it. and the sorrow that 
touched Irving's humor with a gentle melancholy, in a 
large degree determined the quality o( his work. He 
himself wrote long afterwards: "The despondency 1 
had suffered for a long time in the course of this attach- 
ment, and the anguish that attended its catastrophe, 
seemed to give a turn to my whole character, and throw 
some clouds into my disposition which have ever since 
hung about it." Fortunately the "clouds" were not 
angry, storm-threatening ones : rather they were such 
as the sun irradiates, their gloom only emphasizing the 
golden glory of the sunshine that falls upon them. 

Irving was at that time engaged upon his most 
purely humorous work. Knickerbocker's History of A a 
York from the Beginning of the World to the end of the 
Dutch Dynasty. According to his own account his sor- 
row gave him some distaste for its rollicking humor. 
but if that sorrow enlarged his sympathies and refined 



Washington Hrvino 295 

his feeling it added much of tenderness and grace even 
to a work then already wrought out in his mind. How 
much it contributed to the intensely human qualities of 
his later writings, who shall say ? 

The Knickerbocker History was Irving's first success- 
ful work. He had written, in a letter to a friend, of that 
anticipated time when, "you and I shall get this great, 
stupid public by the ears," and the History of New 
York fully accomplished that cherished purpose. Its 
success was phenomenal for that time. It earned for 
Irving the sum of $}ooo — the amount which the suc- 
cessful author of to-day would receive from the sale of 
20,000 copies of a book published at $1 .50 a copy. Better 
still, it made its author famous, both in this country and 
abroad. This was the more remarkable inasmuch as 
the book was the very first distinctively American work 
in creative literature that attracted attention in England, 
or deserved attention, for that matter. 

But even the remarkable success of this his first 
work, did not prompt Irving to make deliberate choice 
of literature as a profession. Perhaps it was in part 
because there was at that time no such thing as a 
profession of literature in America. But a larger reason 
seems to have been the fact that Irving was by tem- 
perament averse to the systematic following of any 
profession. Years afterwards, in England, when finan- 
cial distress had fallen upon him, Walter Scott came 
forward with an offer to make him editor of a new 
magazine which he, Scott, wished to found ; but Irving, 
in spite of his pecuniar) - need, declined the generous 



2q6 Cbc flDen of letters 

offer, pleading in excuse his constitutional inability to 
cimage systematically in any employment. How much 
more strongly must this temperamental difficulty have 
influenced him about the year 1S10. when he found 
himself a partner of his brothers in a lucrative business 
which gave him a sufficient income without severely 
taxing his energies or exacting much of his attention. 

He detested the law. and was clearly unfit for its 
practice. He was exceedingly iond o\ society and even 
o( dissipation o\ a certain not very scandalous sort. 
He had money enough to indulge these tastes and 
literary reputation enough to make him something of a 
lion in all drawing-rooms. So instead of following up 
the Knickerbocker success he entered upon a career 
of social enjoyment enlivened by a certain rather idle 
dalliance with the muses. That is to say, he nominally 
edited a magazine and did some desultory writing 
which added nothing to his reputation. 

This lasted until 1815, when Irving went again to 
England, where the firm, o\ which he was a member, 
had a house. About the time of his arrival there the 
firm fell into financial difficulties, and his brother, who 
had managed it. fell ill. As a consequence, Irving was 
compelled to devote himself, for the next three years, 
to business affairs for which he had no liking and not 
much fitness. But the fame of his Knickerbocker was 
still fresh in Great Britain, and during these years it 
brought him into intimate friendship with Sir Walter 
Scott, the elder Disraeli, and many others of those best 
worth knowing in literature and art. 



Masbington llivino 297 

In 1818 his firm failed, and Irving was thrown upon 
his own resources. A government employment was 
offered him from Washington, but it was declined. 
For Irving had at last chosen the literary life as his 
own. In 1 8 10 he brought out in America the first 
number of The Sketch Book. It contained the 
immortal romance of " Rip Van Winkle," and achieved 
instant success. Other numbers followed and sustained 
the popularity of the work. Irving had not thought of 
The Sketch Book as a work that could appeal to 
English favor, and had therefore made no arrangement 
for an English edition. But the pirates were keener 
than he to scent popularity, and presently they came 
forward with a fragmentary London edition. On this 
hint Irving acted, and in 1820 John Murray brought out 
an authorized edition of the book. Its success was im- 
mediate and phenomenal. All over England the book 
was greeted with enthusiasm. 

At that time Irving might well have said, with 
Byron, "I woke up one morning and found myself 
famous." 

Other works followed, as a matter of course. 
Bracebridgc Hall, in 1822, and Tales of a Traveller, in 
1824. For the three books Murray paid the author 
no less than $15,^25, the payments increasing with 
each work published. 

In 1S20, Irving began those Spanish studies which 
later bore so rich a fruitage. In that year he went to 
Madrid as an attache of the American Legation. 
There he plunged into the archives as a boy dives into 



2qS Zbe .Often of letters 

a temptingly limpid stream, and at the end of two 
years he published his fascinating Life of Columbus 
in London and New York. Again increased apprecia- 
tion brought him greater gains, this work yielding him 
the sum of SiS.ooo — or nearly as much as all his 
earlier works together had brought to him. It gave him 
a new and enlarged recognition, also, as a historian, a 
man of diligent research and accurate scholarship, a man 
to be taken seriously in the domain of letters, and his 
later work profited mightily by this reputation, con- 
joined as it was with an equal fame for extraordinary 
lucidity, simplicity, and picturesqueness of literary 
style. The Conquest of Grenada which followed, 
in 1S2Q, and the Tales of the Alhatnbra (1832) were 
additional products o\ his residence in Spain, where 
fact fed his fancy and history furnished a fit background 
for his splendid imaginings. The subjects enlisted all 
his sympathies, and their treatment gave opportunity 
for the exercise of all his extraordinary graces of style 
and literary presentation. 

In 1S20 Irving was made secretary of legation to 
the American Ministry at London, and during the next 
three years he enriched his acquaintance with British 
life and letters in notable ways — meantime not neg- 
lecting to enjoy to their full the delights of that high 
social life which he so greatly loved. He produced no 
literary work of consequence during this period, but 
the work already done was recognized by a medal from 
the Royal Society of Literature, and by an honorary 
decree from the University of Oxford. 



Wasbtnoton Irving 299 

After an absence of seventeen years, Irving returned 
to New York in [832, a better American than ever, his 
patriotism and his pride of country stimulated not only 
by his broadened comprehension of what the land dis- 
covered by Columbus was destined to be in human 
history, but by every comparison he had made between 
the older civilization and the new. On his return he 
found his country greatly changed ; but all the changes 
were for the better ; all of them had been made along 
those lines of progress which his shrewd intelligence 
saw to be the natural lines of American growth. 

With intent to settle himself in a worthy home-life 
he bought the place Sunnyside, and gathered those 
dearest to him there, his brother and his nieces tilling 
the place in his heart and home which his early 
bereavement had left vacant. His literary work during 
the next five years was comparatively unimportant. 
He chronicled a tour on the prairies, and wrote of 
Astoria with appreciation, but without making any 
strong appeal to his readers. Much the same was true 
of his Adventures of Captain Bonneville, which ap- 
peared in 1817. Nothing that he ever wrote was defi- 
cient in charm, but these works were trifles as compared 
with those that had gone before, and they added noth- 
ing to his reputation. Yet what schoolboy is there who 
has not read with unmeasured delight the story of the 
bee tree in the Crayon Miscellanies? And how en- 
chanting must that work be to the generations which 
did not have birth till after the prairies, with their 
wierd vastness and mystery, were converted into 



3 oo Gbe flDen of Xctters 

commonplace farms, or vulgarized by steam gang 
ploughs and improved threshing machines ! 

And then, too, Irving was going back to his old 
literary love in his magazine work during these years 
with Wolfert's Roost (1854) as a ' on g delayed but 
delightful result. 

In 1842 Irving was sent back to Spain, this time as 
the American Minister. He went with much reluc- 
tance and some anticipations of enjoyment — reluctance 
to leave the delightful home-life he had created for 
himself at Sunnyside, and eager anticipations of joy in 
a renewal of the studies that had so fascinated him in 
the archives of the ancient kingdom. He pleasantly 
looked forward, too, to the renewal of old friendships, 
and to an agreeable revival of his interest in the pic- 
turesque life and character of the Spanish people. 

He remained in Spain for four years, so occupied 
with the official and social duties of his diplomatic post 
that he did no literary work of consequence. He seems, 
indeed, to have begun to feel old, and to regard his 
work as done and himself as entitled to rest. He had 
still one important and long contemplated task to ac- 
complish—the Life of Washington. But he did no 
work on it in Madrid, and on his return to Sunnyside 
in 1840 was disposed, not to relinquish the purpose, 
but to postpone it to some Spanish "to-morrow." 

Yet during his second residence in Spain Irving had 
prepared himself for one piece of work which readers 
would not willingly have missed. He made those 
studies which resulted in Mahomet and his Siuws- 



Masbinoton Hrvino 301 

sors—a work which was a delightful revelation of 
a fascinating history when it first appeared in 1849-50, 
and which remains to this day the very best interpre- 
tation that literature anywhere furnishes of the spirit 
and purpose and achievements of the prophet and of 
those who carried forward his work after him. 

At the time of Irving's return to America his works 
seemed to have had their day. They were mostly out 
of print and they held in men's minds the place of 
things that had been, rather than of things that were. 
It was then that Mr. George P. Putnam rendered the 
most inestimable of his great services, not only to 
Irving's fame, but to American literature as well. With 
his large-minded liberality as a publisher, and with his 
unusually generous literary culture, he was unwilling 
that Irving's writings should sink into neglect and for- 
getfulness. Exercising the privilege of intimate per- 
sonal friendship, he persuaded Irving to undertake a 
thorough revision of his works, and when that was 
done he brought them anew before the public at his own 
financial risk, in a collected edition, which met with a 
popular acceptance scarcely less marked than that which 
the fascinating books had separately won upon their 
first appearance. In a word, Mr. Putnam did much to 
make Irving the foremost of American classic authors, 
where before he had been only a popular writer of his 
time. The The Life of Goldsmith and the Mahomet 
were added at that time to the list of Irving's works. 

The years that followed were not productive. Irving 
toiled from time to time over the long-postponed Life 



302 £be men of Xcttcrs 

of Washington, but he was now too old and too 
world-weary to put into it the kind of genius that had 
so greatly fascinated men in his earlier books. When 
at last, in the closing year of his life, he put forth the 
final volume of this Life, it was felt to be a careful, 
conscientious, and admirably accurate work ; but it 
sadly lacked the verve, the enthusiasm, and the sympa- 
thetic appreciation of its subject which would very 
certainly have made it a work of lasting, national im- 
portance, if by good fortune its author could have 
written it during the vigor of his manhood. 

Except for the abatement of his interest in literary 
pursuits, and the lessening of his power to put into 
literary undertakings that which was best in himself, 
Irving never grew old, in the true sense of those 
words. He preserved his interest in life to fhe end. 
His bubbling humor continued to the last to delight 
those who were privileged to be his intimates. His 
sympathy with all that is human suffered no diminu- 
tion. "No arrogance of age, no irritability of mind, no 
consciousness of his own consequence in human affairs 
came to mar the gentle sweetness of his temper or the 
kindly simplicity of his demeanor. When he died the 
whole country honored and mourned him, but those 
who most sorely felt his loss as a personal bereave- 
ment were the intimates of his household and the 
humble neighbors round about Sunnyside, every one 
of whom wept at his grave in sincere sorrow for one 
whom all the simple folk had learned to think of as a 
friend. 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

THE achievements of Nathaniel Hawthorne as a 
writer of subtle, psychological fiction must 
always be a marvel and a mystery. They 
strangely contradict all accepted theories as to the con- 
ditions that are necessary to the novelist's equipment. 
It is held that in order to depict human character and 
truthfully reflect human life, the novelist must closely 
study men and women of varying kinds and in widely 
differing- circumstances. Hawthorne did nothing of 
the kind. Until after he had written the books upon 
which his fame securely rests, he scarcely knew men 
and women at all. His life up to that time had been, 
indeed, precisely the reverse of that which is supposed 
to be the necessary apprenticeship of the novelist. 

Born in 1S04. in the dull and decaying village of 
Salem, where neither life nor character presented any 
variety of interest, Hawthorne was from earliest child- 
hood secluded and solitary amid surroundings of the 
most depressing character. His father died when he 
was four years old, and his mother at once went into a 
seclusion more than monastic, from which she never 
303 



304 <Tbc m>en of letters 

afterwards emerged. The elder of his sisters, too. as 
she grew up. developed the temper and habits of a re- 
cluse, separating herself from all association, even with 
her brother and sister, so far as that was possible. So 
strong was her hermit habit that she passed the last 
thirty years of her life in a lonely farmhouse by the 
sea, with nobody about her but the farmer's family, 
who were wholly incapable o\ companionship with one 
oi her education and tastes. The hermit instinct was a 
family failing. 

Hawthorne himself shared the family tendency to 
solitary living, and. even as a boy, sought no healthful 
boyish companionships. When he grew up he lived 
almost wholly in his chamber, and even after his mar- 
riage — which was one of complete sympathy and 
happiness— it was his custom to pass the greater part 
of his waking hours in solitude in his study, in the 
woodlands, and by night in lonely paddlings on 
the dark face of a little river, but always far away 
from human companionship, even that of his loving 
wife. In brief, here was a man who took the ut- 
most pains to see as little as possible of his fellow- 
human beings, men or women, to commune with 
them as briefly and as infrequently as he might, to 
see nothing of society, to heed nothing of affairs, to 
learn nothing of human ways. Yet out of his solitude 
this man, untutored of experience, unaccustomed to the 
ways o\ men, sent forth books that astonished the 
English-speaking world, and that still astonish it. by 
the subtle insight that inspires them, by the profound 



Nathaniel Hawthorne 

From the painting by A. E. Smith 
Reproduced by permission of Foster Bros., Boston 



matbanicl Ibawtborne 305 

mastery they display of the deepest springs of human 
conduct, and by the extraordinary truthfulness and 
convincing character of their interpretation of human 
motives. 

Mr. Julian Hawthorne has very properly and effec- 
tively rebuked the foolishness which a while ago 
prompted certain enthusiasts to compare Hawthorne 
with Shakespeare. And yet there is one characteristic 
of genius which Hawthorne undoubtedly shared with 
Shakespeare — namely, a subtle, instinctive, and un- 
erring insight into the human heart, a marvellous 
mastery of the impulses of the soul. 

All this had its best revelation in The Scarlet Letter, 
The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Ro- 
mance — works produced while yet their author was 
hiding himself in solitude, and refusing to mingle among 
men. Travel and a larger association with his fellows 
came to him later, but after those opportunities were 
his he wrote no bonks comparable with these, no books 
that revealed so profound an insight, or made so irre- 
sistible an appeal for acceptance as revelations of truth. 
His intuitive perceptions were safer guides to a knowl- 
edge of truth than other men's experience, and expe- 
rience, when it came, added nothing to his power. 
That is why we may apply to him in all sincerity the 
much abused word Genius. 

Hawthorne was fortunate, too, in the possession of 
a literary style of peculiar clearness and unusual attract- 
iveness in which to clothe the wonderful creations of 
his imagination. Even in his earliest writings there is 



3oo £be HDen of letters 

no affectation, no insincerity, no excess, and no rhetor- 
ical false note. The uncompromising honest)' of his 
character, and perhaps also the singular shyness and 
modesty of his nature protected him always from errors 
of that kind. It is not difficult to suppose that the ex- 
treme simplicity of utterance which adds a special 
charm of its own to his style, was learned in fairy-land, 
where, he tells us. he always lived by preference when 
permitted to do so. 

Hawthorne passed his boyhood mainly in the dull, 
dispiriting atmosphere of Salem, but a year or so of it 
was spent in the woodlands of Maine, where he found 
a congenial solitude under the trees or by the margin 
of a little lake. He was prepared for college under 
the personal tuition o\ Dr. Worcester, the author of 
Worcester's Dictionary. At the age o\ seventeen he 
entered Bowdoin College, where he won disl 
among the students as a writer of college themes, but 
made no great mark for scholarship. 

On leaving college he was without a calling and 
without prospects. He seems also to have been with- 
out much ambition. At any rate he made no marked 
effort to improve his condition. He sought out no 
employment, but lapsed again into his life of solitude. 
For twelve years he lived, as he has himself reported. 
'" in a lonely chamber." which he rarely left except for 
lonelier twilight rambles by the sea. It was an ex- 
tremely unhealthy life and one that might well have 
brought unwholesome literature as its consequence. 
But it did not. During this time Hawthorne read and 



IRatbaniel Ibawtborne 307 

wrote much, but most of what he wrote by day he 
burned at night. The remainder he published in vari- 
ous periodicals and annuals. As he published anony- 
mously his writings brought him no recognition, and 
as the pay was always very small and was often with- 
held entirely, his industry brought him but scanty 
bread and butter. In 182b — the year after his gradu- 
ation, —he published his first novel, Fanshawe. It 
met with no success and Hawthorne presently sup- 
pressed it. It has been republished since his death. 
He met with other rebuffs in his efforts to win public 
attention, and for a time contented himself with pub- 
lishing small productions in newspapers and magazines 
of limited circulation. In 18^0 he sent some manuscripts 
to S. G. Goodrich (Peter Parley), who offered him $35 
for the privilege of publishing one of them in his an- 
nual, which was called the Token and Atlantic Souve- 
nir. At the same time Goodrich promised to find a 
publisher for the book that embraced all of them if pos- 
sible. As the papers were all anonymous, Goodrich 
ultimately included four of them in a single volume of 
the Token in 1831. Goodrich also secured for Haw- 
thorne the editorship of The American Magazine of Use- 
ful and Entertaining Knowledge, at a salary of $soo a 
year, most of which was never paid. Hawthorne at 
this time compiled for Goodrich a Universal History, 
for which he received the munificent sum of $100. 
Think of it ! One of the greatest creative writers that 
America has produced, set to write a Universal His- 
tory, to be published under another man's pen name,. 



3oS Zbc flDcn of letters 

all for less money than a capable newspaper reporter 
in our day earns every week, and often by a single 
article ! 

The country had not at that time achieved or even 
declared its intellectual independence, of Great Britain. 
Even had Hawthorne put forth The Scarlet Letter 
then, it is doubtful that any considerable portion of the 
public would have dared proclaim him a great writer 
until British criticism should first give them leave. In- 
deed, the first reception given in this country to The 
Scarlet Letter and its successor, was that of pleased 
fancy rather than anything higher or better. The re- 
viewers and readers oi the books — all but a select few 
— thought and spoke of Hawthorne rather as a very 
clever romance writer, with a charming literary style, 
than as a new-born force in the world of letters. It 
was not until the sea brought to them news of the im- 
pression made in England by his works that Americans 
generally ventured to recognize Hawthorne's genius 
for what it was. Irving had had a like experience, for 
it was only after English criticism had dubbed him 
knight and awarded him his spurs, that he of Sunny- 
side succeeded— to borrow his own phrase— in getting 
"this great stupid public by the ears." 

But English approval came to Hawthorne, in some 
small degree at least, before his great work was begun. 
As early as [835 the London Athenceum made a text 
of his stories in the Token recognizing both their 
charm and the promise that was in them. This en- 
couraged him to collect those stories and others, and. 



IRatfoaniel Ibawtborne 309 

with the pecuniary support of his friend Horatio 
Bridge, he brought out the first series of Twice Told 
Tilt's. After a time Goodrich pronounced the book a 
financial success, in support of which judgment he 
cited the fact that about seven hundred copies had been 
sold ! Here we see in all its glory the inducement 
which a literary career held out to this penniless genius 
who was about to get married, and to whom for years 
yet to come the doubt about the morrow's bread and 
butter was destined to be the burden of each day's 
anxiety. We see also why Hawthorne, with all his 
gifts and all his high imaginings was content in 1819 
to accept a post in the Boston custom house as a 
weigher and gauger of merchandise at a salary of 
$1200 a year. The facts are anything but creditable 
to a people who even then prided themselves upon 
a superior intellectuality and vaunted their culture. 
Their neglect would have cost us all that Hawthorne is 
to our literature and our national good name, had the 
gifted dreamer lived elsewhere than in the fairy-land of 
his own imaginings, or had he been duly mindful of 
his own necessities and those of the family that was so 
soon to be his. As it was, the neglect served only to 
dispirit him for a time and perhaps to postpone for a 
little the splendid fruition of his genius. 

For in spite of all his discouragements Hawthorne 
never wavered in his purpose to go on as well as he 
could with the work that nature had made him to do. 
He accepted such employment as that in the custom 
house as affording a temporary means of subsistence, 



3 io Sbc fIDen of letters 

and never as a stepping-stone to a career other than 
his chosen one of creative writer. But for his real 
work he needed always his solitude and his musings, 
and, therefore, during his two years in the custom 
house he produced nothing. Fortunately for letters, 
the Whigs came into power at the end of two years, 
and dismissed Hawthorne from the service, upon the 
then accepted theory that no Democrat could be 
trusted by a Whig administration to weigh and gauge 
merchandise properly — or, in plainer terms, because 
politics was in that unenlightened state which was 
reflected in Marcy"s barbaric dictum, "To the victors 
belong the spoils." 

Thus compulsorily freed from official drudgery, 
Hawthorne retired again to his "lonely chamber" and 
to his literary work, and presently he brought out a 
book of historical sketches for young people. He had 
saved about a thousand dollars, and he unwisely in- 
vested and lost it in that picturesquely impractical 
experiment, the Brook Farm community. He joined 
the community but quickly found himself out of sym- 
pathy with the life at Brook Farm. That life was, 
indeed, fundamentally impossible to one of his tempera- 
ment. It was community life, while he was by incli- 
nation and lifelong habit a recluse, a man of intense 
individuality. Its purpose was to promote close and 
constant association, while his very nature shrank from 
such daily contact with others. He himself said of his 
experiment: "1 went to live in Arcady and found 
myself up to the chin in a barn-yard." He therefore 



IRatbanid Ibawtborne 3" 

remained but a brief time in the community of brilliant 
scholars and thinkers, and in 1842 — poor as he was 
after sinking his savings in the experiment — he mar- 
ried and went to live in the old manse at Concord. 
The only return he got from Brook Farm was a back- 
ground for The BUthedale Romance, written long 
afterwards. 

At Concord, for the first time, Hawthorne was 
thoroughly happy He had for his wife a woman 
peculiarly fit to minister to a nature such as his, and 
from beginning to end their married life, as reflected in 
their letters and journals, and in the delightfully inti- 
mate biography written by their son, appears to have 
been a poem unmarred by a single false quantity. Haw- 
thorne's only trouble during all the years of his most 
productive literary activity was the daily necessity of 
struggling with the problem of bread-winning. 

In the old manse he resumed both his writing and 
his habits of solitude, habits that his wonderfully wise 
and tenderly sympathetic wife encouraged as a neces- 
sary condition of life and work for him. 

He here produced some of the stories afterwards 
collected as Mosses from an Old Mjnse, publishing them 
in a magazine which paid him meagerly and uncertainly 
for them. On their proceeds, however, the family 
contrived to live, and presently a child was born to 
them, the eldest of the three whom Hawthorne made 
his playmates and his only entertainers in the years to 
come. In 184s the second series of Twice Told Tales 
appeared, achieving a somewhat larger sale than its 



3i2 £be HDen of Xcttcrs 

predecessor had done. For Hawthorne had been slowly 
but steadily gaining the favor of those who read. 

After four years in the old manse, Hawthorne met 
with serious losses, chiefly through the failure of the 
Democratic Review while heavily in his debt— heavily 
at least from the point of view of a man so poor as he 
at that time was. This failure not only lost to him the 
return he should have had from stories already written 
and published, but it cut off his chief reliance for a con- 
tinued income from his writings. He therefore quitted 
his Arcady and returned to Salem, where, in 1840. he 
was made surveyor of the port, and established himself 
in the custom house. 

It was during his three years' incumbency of this 
office that he wrote the first draft of The Scarlet Letter, 
the work which first brought him fame, and first re- 
vealed to an appreciative world the full measure of his 
genius. The story was published in 1850, and achieved 
a success such as Hawthorne had never known and 
probably had not hoped for, and especially such as he 
had not anticipated from that work. For both he and 
his publisher distrusted the story as much too sombre 
to be widely accepted. After a first edition of five 
thousand copies had been sold during the first fortnight, 
both author and publisher were convinced that there 
could be no further demand for the book, and so the 
type from which it had been printed was distributed. 
But the demand for the story continued and increased, 
until it became necessary to set the pages anew, and to 
stereotype them. 



IHatbanicl Ibawtborne 313 

Now for the first time Hawthorne came to his own. 
Both in America and in England, where the book had 
been reprinted, The Scarlet Letter became immediately 
the most widely popular book of the time, and the 
enthusiasm with which British critics hailed the work 
as a remarkable manifestation of genius encouraged 
the timid among Hawthorne's own countrymen to 
recognize him for what he was. 

And his newly won fame brought to him, of course, 
a greatly increased earning capacity, a new and larger 
market for his literary wares. But fortunately Haw- 
thorne did not exploit his popularity. His artistic con- 
science was too fine and true to permit him to trade 
upon his name, as so many popular writers of later 
times have done. He did not fall into that lamentable 
and dishonoring mistake which has been so often 
made in our less conscientious age. 

Hawthorne could never live contentedly in one 
place for any great length of time. Now that his place 
in the world was made, as one of the most renowned 
of American men of letters, he removed to Lenox, in 
the Berkshire Hills, and again went into close seclusion, 
living in an ugly little red farmhouse a mile or more 
from the village, on a lonely country road. Herman 
Melville lived at Pittsfield, not far away, and Haw- 
thorne saw a good deal of him. Otherwise his com- 
panions were his wife and children, the little lake, and 
the beautiful hills. Here he produced The House of 
the Seven Gables, which was published in 1851, and 
at once achieved a popularity even greater than that 



314 £be flDen of Xcttcrs 

of The Scarlet Letter. During the next year he 
wrote the Wonder Book for children, a fascinating 
story book founded upon the classic mythology, which 
at once made him the idol of all the young people of 
that generation. During the next year he published 
The Snow Image and Other Twice Told Tales. 

By the autumn of 1851 Hawthorne's old restlessness 
returned, and he removed from Lenox to West Newton, 
a most unattractive and railroad)' suburban village near 
Boston. Here he remained for less than a year, during 
which time he wrote the third of that trilogy of tales 
on which his tame securely rests — The Blithedale 
Romance. 

In [852 he returned to Concord, where he had 
bought a house which he named "The Wayside." 
Here he remained until the spring of [853, when his 
old college intimate and lifelong friend, Franklin 
Pierce, who had become President of the United States, 
appointed him to the consulate at Liverpool, at that 
time the most desirable office, from a pecuniary point 
of view, within the President's gift. During Haw- 
thorne's incumbency. Congress passed an act so far 
reducing the emoluments of the office as to leave the 
consul with barely sufficient income to cover his 
expenses. 

During his later stay at Concord, Hawthorne con- 
tinued to write, but he produced no more works com- 
parable in quality with the wonderful three already 
put forth. The really great work of his life was done, 
and all that followed, to the end of his days, was good 



"IRatbaniel Ibawtborne 315 

rather than great literature, unless possibly the reader 
may feel inclined to reckon The Marble Faun, 
written in Italy and England with The Scarlet Letter, 
The House of the Seven Gabels, and The Blithedale 
Romance. 

Hawthorne remained in England during the four 
years of Pierce's presidency, and afterwards travelled 
on the continent of Europe, returning to Concord just 
before the outbreak of the Civil War. Little more 
of consequence happened to him during the few 
years that remained to him of life. He died on May 18, 
1864, honored and beloved as few Americans have 
ever been by their countrymen, most honored and 
beloved by those who were permitted to know him 
best. 

His love of solitude was unnatural and unhealthy 
of course, but it had no touch of moroseness or even 
of melancholy about it. He lived, as he said, in fairy- 
land. Guests could not visit him there, and if he must 
receive them he must quit the paradise of his imaginary 
world for a world less real to him and less attractive. 

He had a great gift of happiness. His cheerfulness 
was extraordinary, and his kindliness unbounded. In 
his children he found unfailing delight, and his com- 
panionship with them was so intimate, so sympathetic, 
so childlike in its abandonment, that, as his son has 
recorded, they never desired other companionship than 
his when he was near. 

His literary themes were usually sombre in their 
setting, but were illumined in his handling of them by 



316 Zbc flDen of Xettcrs 

a humor as subtle as his psychology itself and as fasci- 
nating. 

In personal character he was altogether admirable, 
and his fame is unsullied by any act that it is neces- 
sary to explain or to excuse. 





HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 

BY way of introduction to a voluminous life of 
the poet Longfellow, his brother, the Rev. 
Samuel Longfellow, is at pains to warn his 
readers that there is little in that life to call for bio- 
graphical record. So far as events were concerned the 
whole story of Longfellow's career might easily be 
written upon a sheet or two of note paper and, except 
for the interest that necessarily attaches to all that con- 
cerns the personality of a beloved poet, even that brief 
record might be reduced to a few lines, setting forth 
that Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, on Feb- 
ruary 27, 1807; that he was educated at Bowdoin Col- 
lege ; that after a period of study in Europe— which 
was later followed by other like periods of study— he 
became a professor of modern languages at Bowdoin 
and afterwards at Harvard ; that he was twice happily 
married ; that he wrote the poems which have en- 
deared his name to all Americans and won recognition 
for his genius in other lands ; and that he died in Cam- 
bridge, Massachusetts, on March 24. 1882. 

So far as incident was concerned, his life included 
317 



318 Gbc (IDcn of letters 

none of it. It was, from beginning to end, that quiet, 
uneventful, and only gently emotional life of which his 
poetry is the noblest and fittest reflection that our 
literature holds. 

Perhaps he would have been a greater poet if he had 
suffered more. Perhaps he would have sounded a 
stronger note of song if his experience had been less 
tranquil. Perhaps if he had been a man of less exem- 
plary life : if he had sinned and repented more ; if his 
experience had been more strenuous, more passionate, 
more intense ; if fortune, if mischance, if weakness of 
will, had brought into his being more trying experi- 
ences, more of personal acquaintance with the seamy 
side of life, more of remorse, more of folly, and more of 
recompensing repentance his poetry might have made 
a more irresistible appeal than it does to men of warm 
blood and conscious human weakness. 

John Milton said— and surely John Milton knew — 
that poetry must be "simple, sensuous, passionate." 
The poetry of Longfellow is simple enough ; in a 
very gentle and reserved way it is sensuous, but its 
passion is never intense enough to raise it to the 
highest levels of inspiring force. Even in Evange- 
line — a story as dramatic in its incidents as any that 
human life and love and sorrow have ever combined 
to bring to birth, we have tar more of exquisite, 
idyllic portrayal than of tempestuous passion, heroic 
assertion or intense imagining of good or ill. Think 
what a telling Victor Hugo would have given to that 
tale ! Imagine the intensity of passion that Byron 



Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 

From the painting by G. P A. Healy 
Reproduced by permission of Foster Bros., Boston 






£be flDen of 1c 









Ibenr^ Ma&swortb Xongfdlow 3 '9 

would have infused into it ! Picture the result that 
Walter Scott would have wrought out of it, had it 
been his to relate in verse ! 

But these were Longfellow's limitations. It was 
given to him to sing the gentler emotions and to re- 
flect in his verse the less strenuous, less passionate 
life of which alone, from youth to age, he had per- 
sonal experience. And surely no poet has more per- 
fectly fulfilled his mission than he did. No poet has 
more inspiringly spoken the thought of those who 
lead sheltered lives, or more entrancingly reflected 
the emotions of those to whom simplicity of soul, 
uprightness of conduct, and purity of mind seem the 
necessary and only tolerable conditions of worthy 
human living. 

To the gentle, to the refined, to those of simple 
life, to those who find this world of ours a theatre of 
lowly duty and only humble ambitions, Longfellow 
must always be a prophet whose words are irresistibly 
inspiring, and to readers of less gentle experience they 
bear always a winsome message of persuasion to 
simpler and purer and homlier ways of living and 
thinking and feeling than any that the great world 
knows. 

The "Psalm of Life" is a sermon of untold excel- 
lence in its inspiration to earnestness and honesty of 
soul. The "Village Blacksmith" is an apotheosis of 
those homlier human virtues on which mainly the 
sweetening of human life depends. The " Old Clock 
on the Stairs " ticks out more than one lesson that it 



320 £be HDcn of Xettcrs 

were well for all men and women to learn. It is in 
these poems and such as these that we find the true 
quality of Longfellow, the note that made him above 
all and beyond all the poet of the people, the inter- 
preter and the inspirer of that simple and honest and 
sweetly wholesome living that lies at the foundation of 
our national history, and that sadly less and less distin- 
guishes our national character as we grow older in 
world-knowledge, and less like our earlier and better 
selves. 

Mr. Longfellow began writing verse while yet a 
mere boy, and during his student life in college he 
published a number of fugitive pieces in the news- 
papers. Only a few of these did he afterwards deem 
worthy of preservation in more permanent form. It 
was not until 1S39 that Hyperion appeared as his 
first ambitious work. He had already won his audi- 
ence by the "Psalm of Life" and other writings in 
poetry and prose in the magazines, and Hyperion 
quickly confirmed his claim to be reckoned among 
American men of letters. A little later followed Voices 
of the Night, his first orderly volume of poetry. Some 
of the pieces in it — and notably " The Psalm of Life "— 
quickly became household words throughout the coun- 
try, and from that hour Longfellow's fame was estab- 
lished and his audience secure. 

In 1841 appeared the volume entitled Ballads and 
Other Poems, which added to the list of his univers- 
ally popular productions, "The Village Blacksmith," 
" The Wreck of the Hesperus,"' and " Excelsior.'" 



Ibenrp IHflabswortb ILongfdlow 321 

The record of his further work in poetry is a public 
possession, and it need not be here set down in detail. 
In Evangeline Mr. Longfellow embarrassed a very beauti- 
ful story and a very poetical telling of it by adopting 
as its vehicle the so-called English hexameter. That 
is a deformed and hunchbacked kind of verse, differing 
from the Latin hexameter in that, for lack of spondees 
in our language with which to end the lines resonantly, 
it is forced to employ a very lame and halting foot of 
which the first syllable is long and the other triflingly 
short. It is entirely safe to say that the choice of this 
metre for a poem otherwise so full of grace and charm 
was an unfortunate mistake into which the poet's 
elaborate scholarship betrayed him in spite of the pro- 
test of his very musical ear. A man with a set purpose 
may jolt over a corduroy road with ejaculatory pro- 
testations that he never found a turnpike so delight- 
fully smooth ; in like manner one who is set in that 
way may read Evangeline in so loyally appreciative 
a spirit as to declare its form a pleasure-giving one. 
But in the one case as in the other, the experience must 
in fact be one of jolting and joggling. By no possible 
elocutionary device can the lines of Evangeline be 
made to read easily, smoothly, naturally, and with sat- 
isfaction to the ear. But so touching is the story, and 
so exquisitely sympathetic is its telling, that in spite 
of its unfortunate form and versification, it has taken 
its well-deserved place as one of the classics of our 
literature. 

In Miles Standish, written half a lifetime later, 



322 Z\k flDen of letters 

the same meter is used with far better effect. Whether 
because use had taught Longfellow to employ the 
pseudo-hexameter more expertly, or because the theme 
of the poem was better adapted to this form, or because 
ot some other and more recondite reason, we read 
Miles Standish with greater ease and more of musi- 
cal satisfaction than we do Evangeline. And Miles 
Standish has the additional merit o\ telling one of the 
most fascinating love stories that have been written 
since the ancient chronicler celebrated in everlasting 
poetry the devotion of Ruth to Boaz. It was Ruth 
who spoke and Boaz who heard, when Priscilla inter- 
rupted John Alden's eloquence in behalf o( his friend, 
with her exasperated maidenly protest, "Why don't 
you speak for yourself, John ? " 

In Hiawatha which was published in 1855, Mr. 
Longfellow undertook to do for the Indian side of our 
very romantic and picturesque national history what 
he had already done for another side of it in Evangeline, 
what he was already planning to do for a still other 
side of it in The Courts/zip of Miles Standish. Un- 
happily, in his ambition to devise new metrical vehicles 
for English verse he adopted for Hiawatha a metre 
and a method that lent themselves with fatal facility to 
parody and imitation. When the poem appeared there 
was not a college in all the land in which some more 
or less clever student did not record college happen- 
ings in Hiawathan verse, not a rural newspaper that 
did not bristle with like efforts from the hands of local 
wits and pretending humorists. The poem became — 



1bcnr\> THflabswortb Xongtellow 323 

quite undeservedly — a joke, and for a time at least its 
appeal to serious attention was lost in the frivolity of 
its imitators. 

Nevertheless, it is a poem of great and lasting 
worth, and in despite of the oceans of parody in which 
for a time it seemed destined to be swamped, it has 
vigorous life in it still, which will increase in interest as 
the country recedes farther and farther from the Indian 
life of which it furnishes our noblest poetic record. 

Unlike most of the guild of the poets, Mr. Longfel- 
low prospered in his worldly affairs, and some years 
before his death he was enabled by the profits that his 
books yielded to retire from the drudgery of his profes- 
sorship, and for a little while to enjoy that leisure which 
a lifetime of sincere endeavor ought to bring, but often 
does not, to every man whose service to mankind is 
of his best. 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

TO commonplace minds Ralph Waldo Emerson 
must always be an inscrutable enigma. Even 
to those who knew him best and best under- 
stood him, he was an Oracle, teaching often in 
paradoxes, and often veiling his thought in mystical 
utterances not always easily understood. 

It is difficult to define a genius such as his — a 
genius that never succeeded in defining itself, though 
believing absolutely in itself as a Divine emanation. 
By way of suggestion, rather than of definition, it may 
be said that Emerson was a poet who believed his own 
poetry, a seer who reverently held his own thought to 
be a revelation of Divine truth, in the deliverance of 
which he was merely the agent and implement of a 
higher power, and not in any sense himself a creative 
intelligence. It is necessary to understand clearly his 
intellectual attitude in this respect if we would at all 
understand his life and work. Emerscn held inspira- 
tion to be the source of all that is good in utterance. 
He regarded Divine revelation as a gift of God to man, 
not confined to any period of human history or to any 



Ralph Waldo Emerson 

painting by A. E. Smith 
Reproduced , Foster Bros., Bosto 



ftnlpb UQnloo £mcreon 

group of specially inspired men, but as a n 
ering itself continuously in all times and count: 

innumera: human and other. He 

utterly rejected the thought that God had r- 
himself and his will once for all in a body of cai 
scriptur* \ had withdrawn himself behind the 

veil of I 
• 
which the great majority of men were destine 

He believed that revelation is never final, but 
always progre % to man in e 

land, as man is fitted by circumstance to receive the 
enlightenment of truth. 

Equally he rejected the theory that our only means 

• s. He 
indeed, as 
he share : 
e of matt' 
which alone the s< 
tioned the reality of phe 

of the mind. He ; be the best source 

is capable of 
rid that 
■ 

nomena is to 
be weighed for an instant. 
In thi 

dness of hi 
what he believed to be tr it to find its 

way to acceptance 



3^6 £bc fi>cn of Xetters 

than this he was powerless to answer. If challenged 
to furnish proof he sat silent. If required to defend his 
teachings or to reconcile them with conclusions drawn 
from phenomena, he declined to undertake the task. 
firmly believing that intuition and intellectual and 
moral perception, furnish safer guides than any argu- 
ment based upon phenomena can — that truth is inde- 
pendent of what we call fact, and superior to it. In 
his writings he made large and fruitful use of the phe- 
nomena of nature, but only by way o\ suggestion, never 
in support o\ what he believed to be truth, but con- 
stantly in helpful illustration of it. 

This is necessarily an inadequate statement. Let 
us strengthen and clarity it by quoting Emerson's own 
account o\ his attitude. In an address before the 
Divinity School at Harvard, in 1838, he frankly preached 
all his heresies, not with offensive dogmatism, but with 
perfect candor and sweet persuasiveness. Instantly his 
teaching was challenged, not alone by the orthodox 
and conservative, but equally by the most advanced 
and liberal Unitarians. Among these was the Rev. 
Henry Ware. Emerson's friend and former colleague. 
He wrote to Emerson on the subject and preached a 
sermon in answer to the address. In reply Emerson 
wrote a letter in which he said : 

•■ It strikes me very oddly that good and wise men at Cambridge 
and Boston should think of raising me into an object of criticism. 
. . . I well know there is no scholar less willing or less able 
than myself to be a polemic. I could not give an account of myself 
if challenged. I could not possiblv give you one of the •argu- 
ments ' vou cruellv hint at. on which any doctrine of mine stands ; 



IRalpb THHaloo Emerson 327 

for I do not know what arguments are in reference to any expres- 
sion of a thought. I delight in telling what 1 think ; but if you 
ask me how 1 dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless 
of mortal men. I do not even see that either of these questions 
admits of an answer." 

Rejecting all creeds and dogmas, Emerson was, in 
his own person and life, profoundly religious. He has 
been called a pantheist, and he was such, though not 
in the grossly material sense in which we apply that 
term to certain of the ancient philosophers. They held 
that all things are God ; he taught that God is all 
things and all things only a part of God— a spiritual 
doctrine quite different from the materialistic, pagan 
one. That, in Theodore Parker's phrase, "sinks God 
in Nature." Emerson's belief sank Nature in God. He 
held God to be the one, only existence, of which the 
material universe— if it be material— and all created 
souls, are only a thought, an emanation, a manifesta- 
tion. He held human life to be purely educational in 
its purpose, designed to create and develop character 
and to lead through death to a higher and more spirit- 
ual life. He rejected the doctrine of damnation as 
unthinkably inconsistent with the idea of God. But 
he was not quite sure that the human soul might nut 
be incarnated twice or thrice or many times by way of 
preparation for a higher existence, and on at least one 
notable occasion he put forth the thought that in 
God's wisdom human souls might perhaps altogether 
cease to be at death, a teaching which, if he had been 
concerned to argue in justification of his thought, he 
might have found it difficult to reconcile with his 



328 Z\k flDen of letters 

belief concerning the all-embracing, all-including char- 
acter of the Deity as the only existence in the universe. 
Still more difficult would it have been to square this 
suggestion with his firm belief that human souls are 
not created existences, but are from everlasting to 
everlasting. 

Here we are reminded of a notable trait of Emerson's 
mind and character. He had no fear of inconsistency. 
At one time he would frankly contradict what he had 
said at another, without apology or any attempt to 
reconcile the later with the earlier utterance. The 
fundamental characteristic of the man was truthfulness. 
On even- occasion he spoke his thought, not only 
without shrinking, but with deep reverence for it as 
God-given truth. It troubled him not at all if the 
thought of to-day was in contradiction of the thought 
o( yesterday or a year ago. Such inconsistency was 
in entire harmony with his conviction that thought is 
revelation and that revelation is partial, fragmentary, 
progressive. His moral and intellectual courage was 
boundless. A suppression of truth, a withholding of his 
most daring thought for fear of any consequence, was 
as impossible to him as downright lying, and it would 
have seemed the equivalent of that to his apprehension. 

These contradictions are very frequent in his writ- 
ings done at different times. In one case, cited by Dr. 
Oliver Wendell Holmes, the conflict between two 
utterances made at the same time, seems obvious. 
Yet Emerson put forth the two conflicting thoughts 
in close juxtaposition without explanation or any ef- 



IRalpb THttatoo Emerson 329 

fort to reconcile them, offering both equally as truth 
perceived. 

The explanation of this attitude of mind is to be 
found, doubtless, in the fact that Emerson was at 
all times a poet. It is true that a comparatively small 
part of his writings is in metrical form, and that he was 
neither facile nor accurate in the writing of verse. But 
very nearly all his prose is in its essence poetry of an 
exalted character, while some of the passages so over- 
flow with apt and fascinating imagery that, in Dr. 
Holmes's happy phrase, they "seem to long for the 
music of rhythm and the resonance of rhyme." His 
habit of mind was that of the poet altogether, and 
poets are not accustomed to harness their thought 
between thills. They think as the zephyrs blow, and 
if they be honest and fearless, as Emerson was, in a 
scarcely paralleled degree, their utterances take color 
from their moods and are necessarily full of contradic- 
tions which represent the constant shifting of their 
points of view. 

Extraordinary intellectual insight, transparent sim- 
plicity of character, perfect purity of life, and a con- 
scientious devotion to truth as he saw it joined with 
unfaltering moral courage, made Emerson a born leader 
of men in matters of mind and morals. He spoke 
always as one having authority. Yet he claimed no 
authority for himself. He asked of men nothing more 
than acceptance of what messages of truth he might 
bear to them, and that for truth's sake, and not because 
he was the bearer of the messages. He was therefore 



33Q Zbc flDen of letters 

never dogmatic even in rejecting dogma. And in re- 
jecting dogma he never lost sympathy with those who 
clung most tenaciously to old forms of thought and 
belief. He was far more than tolerant. With his 
views as to Divine revelation he found good in all 
religions, in all sincere beliefs and especially in all 
things that tended to the uplifting of character and the 
enthronement of conscience as the ruler of human life : 
and the good that he found in each, he loved and 
revered, as a part of that truth which he regarded as 
of God. 

Yet singularly enough — at least in the contempla- 
tion of lesser minds than his — he steadfastly opposed 
organized propagandist efforts for reform. This is the 
way in which he spoke of such movements. 

"The reforms whose fame now fills the land with Temper- 
ance, Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor, 
fair and generous as each appears, are poor, bitter things when 
prosecuted for themselves as an end. . . . I say to you. plainly, 
there is no end to which your practical faculty can aim so sacred or 
so large that, if pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion 
and an offence to the nostrils. . . . Your end should be one 
inapprehensible to the senses." 

And again he spoke these words of condemnation 
and rebuke : 

"The reforms have their higher origin in an ideal justice, but 
they do not retain the purity of an idea. They are quickly organ- 
ized in some low, inadequate form, and present no more poetic 
image to the mind than the evil tradition which they reprobated. 
Thev mix the fire of the moral sentiment with personal and party 
heats, with measureless exaggerations and the blindness that pre- 
fers some darling measure to justice and truth. Those who are 



IRalpb Malfco Emerson 331 

urging with most ardor what are called the greatest benefit of man- 
kind are narrow, self-pleasing, and conceited men." 



Another seeming contradiction in his intellectual 
attitude and methods is seen in his teaching with 
regard to superlatives. So tar as adjectives were con- 
cerned he detested superlatives and rarely used them. 
Apparently he would have liked to reduce the compari- 
son of all adjectives to two degrees. Yet no writer 
was ever more given than he to hyperbole, to over 
statement, to extravagant excess in the presentation of 
his thought. Not satisfied with the gold, he gilded it, 
and illuminated it with the calcium lights of his fervid 
imagination and his splendid rhetoric. 

In Emerson's life there was so little of incident that 
his biography, so far as externals are concerned, might 
be compressed into a few lines. But as an intellectual 
and moral force, as an inspirer of others to higher and 
purer living, as an apostle of conscience he lived a life 
which many volumes would not adequately compass. 

He was born in Boston, May 25, 1801. He was 
educated at the Boston Latin School and Harvard Col- 
lege, as his forebears had been for several generations 
past. After a period of school teaching he studied 
divinity, entered the pulpit as a Unitarian clergyman, 
and was soon pleasantly settled as minister of an intel- 
lectual and refined congregation. Meantime he had 
married, and in 1832 his wife died. During the same 
year he found himself troubled in mind with respect 
to the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Feeling that he 
could not administer that rite with a good conscience, 



33 2 <Ihc flDcn of letters 

he courageously decided to give up his profession 
and abandon the career that was s.» promisingly 
opening to him. He explained his scruples in a ser- 
mon, and resigned from the ministry, at the aye of 
thirty-two, and. when tempting calls to other pulpits 
came to him he declined them all on conscientious 
grounds. He was a poor man. with no other profes- 
sion but that o\ preaching. Indeed, he was wholly 
unfitted by the quality of his mind for any other. But 
with him prudence and self-interest were never per- 
mitted for an instant to overrule conscience or to 
obscure its light. 

In [833 he went to Europe, making a journey which 
afterwards led to the writing o\ his English Traits. 
On his return he preached occasionally, finally taking 
the lecture platform for his pulpit and delivering there 
and in what are called occasional addresses, his con- 
ceptions o\ truth. Throughout his life. too. he wrote— 
though more sparingly than the cultivated public could 
have desired — for the higher public prints. He went 
to Concord to live, and from the time o\ taking up his 
residence there until age dulled his faculties he was 
recognized as the master by all those intellectual men 
and women of Concord. Boston, and Cambridge, who 
made that age and that region famous for " plain living 
and high thinking." All who were best and wisest 
and most earnest were his intimates, and most of them 
his disciples through whom his teachings were trans- 
mitted to others through. nit the land. 

It is perhaps the best testimony to the purity and 



IRalpb Matoo lEmcrson 333 

sweetness of his character that all who were permitted 
to know him loved him, and that those who knew him 
best loved him best. When his house was burned, in 
1872, a fund for its rebuilding was quickly made up by 
voluntary contributions. No one was asked to sub- 
scribe, yet within a brief time the fund amounted to 
more than eleven thousand dollars. Those who gave 
the money claimed the right to contribute as a precious 
privilege, and the gift was placed in Mr. Emerson's 
hands with so much of delicacy and so much of sincere 
affection that he had no choice but to accept it. He 
was now in his seventieth year and in feeble health. 
The destruction of his house had been a severe shock 
to him. In order to spare him further distress, and for 
the sake of diverting his mind from thoughts of a cal- 
amity which had involved the loss of his household 
gods and still more precious manuscripts, these friends 
of his formed a conspiracy to send him abroad, pend- 
ing the reconstruction of his house. They fabricated a 
mission for him, which did not deceive him. But their 
kindly affection was so apparent that he yielded to 
their desire and went not only to Europe but to the 
Nile. On his return Concord received him with bands 
of music, a triumphal arch, and a greeting like that of a 
returning conqueror. Surely we have in this incident 
an illustration of the extraordinary hold that the quiet, 
solitude-loving poet had taken upon the minds and 
hearts of men. 

Emerson had married his second wife in 183s, and 
to her loving ministrations and the devotion of his sons 



334 Gbe (TDcn of ^Letters 

and daughter, he owed the happiness of his calm and 
beautiful old age. About 1S07 or [868 his faculties 
began to show impairment, first in a progressive loss 
of memory, and later in a distressing aphasia, or loss of 
power to command the words he wanted, even though 
they were merely the names of commonplace things 
which he had no difficulty in describing so as to make 
his meaning clear. His sight failed too. and slowly 
but surely he sank into the doze of old age which pre- 
cedes the sleep of death when death comes naturally 
and not from accident or disease. 

He died on April 27. 1SS2. mourned not only by 
those brilliant men and women who had been his com- 
panions and disciples in life, but by all men throughout 
the land who think and aspire. 



MOJ i^Sg^Cl^ 



^r'^^^ip^^b^? 



THE PREACHERS 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 

EVERY man is the product of his time and country. 
In his character, his intellectual attitude, and, 
ultimately, even in his opinions, he is as truly 
a necessary consequence of his environment as is any 
tree or plant grown in a garden. Heredity gives the 
first impulse, indeed, to the direction of every man's 
development, just as the seed selected determines 
whether the plant is to be of one species or of another. 
But environment does all the rest, in the case of the 
man, just as climate, soil, and cultivation do in the case 
of the plant. There is individuality of strength or 
weakness in both cases of course, but it determines 
scarcely anything more than whether the particular 
specimen of human or plant life is to fulfil its functions 
perfectly or in a less adequate degree. 

It is important to bear this truth in mind in con- 
sidering the life, the character, and the intellectual 
attitude of such a man as Jonathan Edwards. Begin- 
ning in 1701 and ending in 1758, his life was almost 
exactly coterminous with the first half of the eighteenth 
century, and in estimating his work, we must judge 
337 



338 £be Ipreacbcrs 

him always in the light of his time. What that light 
was. we shall presently consider. 

In the meantime it is interesting to observe that 
Jonathan Edwards reasoned upon the great theological 
question that most earnestly engaged his attention. 
upon lines precisely parallel to those suggested above. 
With respect to the freedom of the Human Will, in 
which he believed, and the doctrine of eternal decrees 
in which he also believed, he argued in reconciliation 
o\ the two. substantially in this way : The law of 
cause and effect is universal in its application ; even- 
man is by God's permission, absolutely free to act in 
accordance with his own will ; but his power to will 
is controlled by causes outside himself and so. while 
his will is free to carry out its purposes, he is power- 
less to control the will itself, but must obey the behests 
of a power independent of his own purposes. 

This is very closely like the statement that a flower- 
ing shrub is free to bring forth as many blossoms as it 
has strength to bear, but that it has no choice as to 
what those blossoms shall be in kind. It may aspire 
to roses, but if it be sprung from an apple seed its 
tlowers must be apple blossoms. 

This is a digression, permitted here only because it 
illustrates an interesting tendency of the human mind. 
Jonathan Edwards would have rejected, almost with 
anathemas, the assumption of a parallelism between 
the processes of plant growth and those of the human 
soul's development. And yet his reasoning followed 
lines so close to those of Huxlev and Haeckel and Her- 



Jonathan Edward. 5 



3onatban l£&war&8 339 

bert Spencer, that it requires only an easily inferential 
illustration to make their identity apparent. 

Quitting the digression, let us come back to the 
fact that Jonathan Edwards was a product and a con- 
spicuous example of New England ways of thinking 
during the first half of the eighteenth century. In 
our day it is customary to think of him as the type 
and embodiment of a rigidly strait-laced and almost 
inhumanly merciless theology. But if we duly con- 
sider the environment in which his thinking was done, 
we are forced to regard him rather as a liberal in 
theology than as a conservative ; rather as a man 
disposed to advance toward the light than as a re- 
actionary. There is not the smallest doubt that 
his teachings in his own day were regarded as 
liberal almost to the verge of radicalism, by the less 
able but sterner adherents of Calvinism whose thought 
and influence so largely dominated opinions at that 
time. 

While he was anxiously seeking to reconcile what 
seemed to him the indisputable doctrine of the decrees 
with some form of freedom for the human will— while 
he was trying to find that God was "not the author 
of sin," while still holding fast to his belief that every 
human act and event had been determined by divine 
decree "before ever the foundations of the world were 
laid "—his less sensitive fellows in the pulpit were cry- 
ing simply : "Thus saith the Lord." They preached 
Calvinism equally, without qualification or apology. 
They made no effort to reconcile its contradictions 



Cbc pccacbecs 

explanation of its incons stencies 

human reason. They scorned human reason, in- 
and were disposed to visit all the anathemas 
of the Church upon those who sought to exercis 
in connection with theological dogma. Their mes- 
to mankind was simply this ::ded 

before the world was made, either that you should 
be adopted at death into eternal bliss, or that you 
should be eternally damned in a very literal hell of tire 
and brimstone, and nothing that can in 

se ge - ^nied 

u. In any case you deserve all you get. if you 
are damned, while if you .. s list be simply 

by the d: ine g d pleasure, in spite of your s 
inherited and personally committed. 

_ >t this repellent teaching Jonathan Ed 
instinctively revolted. But the theology upon which 
^ nos too firmly fixed in his mind even to be 
questioned. It was to him like the fact of the day and 
night, or the succession of the seas - 

_ o si hich all contav 

must of r... ssil V 5 -ore than 

this. It was to him the direct revelation of tru: 

Himself, to dispute which was to question the 
He could not reject the theological 
>asis ;':iing. therefore, and so. with an abid- 

ing conviction of the Divine mercy and goodne>> 
s ght, and believed that he had found an explanation 
of it all which sufficiently reconciled the 1 c nflict- 
ing views of the Divine character. He was in truth, 



3onatban Efcwar&s 34' 

therefore, a liberal, judged by his time and the en- 
vironment of his life. 

It is not easy for us of a later and laxer age to 
realize what rigid limitations were then imposed upon 
a devout man's thinking. Let us aid conception by 
mentioning a few of the more obvious restraints that 
at that time saddled themselves like an incubus upon 
thought. The Holy Scriptures were then held to be 
holy in utter fact. They were believed to be the 
direct, final, absolute, and indisputable word of God 
to man, absolutely true and divinely authoritative in 
every word and line and syllable ; and this belief in 
their inspiration extended to the English translation, 
as well as to the Hebrew and Greek originals. This 
authoritative revelation of divine truth admitted of no 
question at any point. To doubt its literal accuracy, 
indeed, was to invoke upon oneself the curses with 
which the Book of Revelation closes. To suggest an 
interpretation other than the obvious and literal one 
of the words, was to make an addition to the revealed 
record of a kind equally anathematized by St. John the 
Divine. 

Thus every believer who, like Jonathan Edwards, 
undertook theological study, was forced to begin and 
continue under the rigid restraint of a divinely inspired 
revelation, which must not only not be disputed in its 
least important part, but must not even be subjected 
to inquiry as to its authority or its significance. The 
theological student of that day no more dared doubt 
any miracle story, or dispute the literal accuracy of any 



34^ £bc fl>rcacbcrs 

statement made in the Bible, than the scientific student 
of to-day dares suggest that gravitation may not be 
a fact, that the correlation of forces is a myth, 
that action and reaction bear no necessary relation to 
each other, or that energy is utterly independent of 
supply. 

Again, it was the fixed habit of men's minds in that 
age to reason from accepted premises without ever 
subjecting the premises to critical inquiry as to their 
truth. Bacon had indeed written the Novum Or- 
ganum some centuries before, but even he had never lost 
that untrustworthy habit of reasoning from dogma 
which his greatest work was written to condemn, and 
the new method had in no perceptible way influenced 
the minds of theological thinkers in Jonathan Edwards's 
day. It was the universal custom, not in theology 
alone but in law. in politics, in medicine, and in every- 
thing else that involved thought, to accept as fixed 
and eternally true, the notions that had been promul- 
gated by men of authority. It was the universal habit 
to reason from such premises to whatever absurd 
conclusions the processes of logic might reach. The 
thought of subjecting the premises themselves to ques- 
tion, or of investigating the right of the authorities to 
dogmatize, never occurred to men. and in theology at 
least it was forbidden by a direct threat of eternal dam- 
nation as its inevitable consequence. 

In other words, the scientific attitude of mind was 
impossible in the time in which Jonathan Edwards 
lived. The spirit of criticism was not yet born. And, 



3onatban lE&war&s 343 

still more important, perhaps, the scholarship upon 
which criticism bases its investigations did not exist. 

All these things constituted the conditions under 
which Jonathan Edwards's thinking and Jonathan Ed- 
wards's work were done. They are facts with which 
we must reckon if we would justly judge the man. If 
he accepted doctrines that are abhorrent to our moral 
sense, he did so under a compulsion of authority 
which we can scarcely even understand ; and it is only 
fair, in estimating his influence, to consider how largely 
it tended to alleviation— how much worse it might 
have been for his countrymen if, with his great ability 
and his masterful influence, he had taught the full 
measure of his doctrine with no attempt to And a soft- 
ening influence, a mitigating explanation of the truth 
as he believed it to be written by God Himself for the 
admonition of mankind. 

Still again it is necessary to bear in mind that, in 
Jonathan Edwards's day, this earthly life was held to 
be of small account, or no account at all, except as a 
stage of existence that furnished opportunity of prepa- 
ration for a future life— for in spite of the doctrine that 
every man's eternal salvation or damnation had been 
irrevocably decreed "before ever the foundations of 
the world were laid," and that the number of the saved 
and of the damned, thus irrevocably fixed by divine 
decree, was " so fixed and limited that it could neither 
be added to nor taken from " — in spite of this doctrine, 
it was still held as revealed truth that the present life 
is a period of probation and preparation, having no 



344 Che preachers 

significance or purpose apart from the work of getting 
ready for the life that is to come. The fatalism of the 
Calvinist of that age was as absolute as that of the 
Mahometan, and it was as utterly inconsistent with 
itself. As the Mahometan who believes that all things 
are determined by Kismet, also confidently believes 
that he who dies in battle for the faith goes instantly 
to Paradise without so much as a question whether 
or not his personal character fits him to enjoy that 
state of existence, so the Calvinist of that inexorably 
logical and most unreasonable time, believed that 
every man's eternal fate was sealed beyond recall, but 
at the same time that he was permitted to live in this 
world in order that his fitness for bliss or its reverse 
in the world to come might be demonstrated. If a 
man were born to be damned it could make no possi- 
ble difference in his fate for him to do well or ill in his 
life on earth. It was expressly set forth by authority 
indeed, that a man condemned to hell before the foun- 
dations of the world were laid, might lead an excellent, 
humane, and most lovely life, without in any wax- 
altering the decree : that he might even attain to a 
large degree of godliness without winning the smallest 
chance of a future life among the godly : that all good- 
ness was a mere matter of " works." and that works, 
either good or evil, counted as nothing in the decrees 
of God : that salvation was by faith alone, and that 
even faith could not save any man from damnation if to 
damnation he had been doomed long ages before he 
was born. 



3onatban i£&war&8 345 

It is not necessary to set forth more fully that ex- 
traordinary medley of contradictions which constituted 
the creed to which Jonathan Edwards was born and in 
which he was trained, and lived and died. It is only 
necessary to bear in mind that this body of belief 
presented itself to his mind, not as a matter to be 
questioned, or to be reasoned about, or to be accepted 
or rejected accordingly as it commended itself to his 
intelligence or affronted his understanding, but as a 
direct, indisputable revelation from God, the absolute 
truth of which was not open even to reverent inquiry. 
He believed not only that God could tell only the 
truth, but that those who professed to bear God's 
messages to man were incapable of misinterpretation, 
misunderstanding, or any perversion of the Word. 

It is with no remotest purpose of theological dispu- 
tation that this brief and incomplete summary of the 
beliefs that dominated Jonathan Edwards's life and 
mind is here set forth. It is solely with the purpose of 
enabling the reader to estimate aright the intellectual 
attitude, the life and the work of Jonathan Edwards, 
by pointing out the conditions under which he lived. 
Interpreted in the light of those conditions, his attitude 
appears as that of the liberal, lacking only the enlight- 
enment of modern scholarship to make him a leader of 
the generous thought of our less logical but more com- 
passionate time. 

For the rest, Jonathan Edwards was a man of extra- 
ordinary uprightness of character and perfect purity of 
life. To his conscience he made sacrifices that may 



346 Sbe iprcacbers 

have been uncalled for, but the record of which must 
awaken the admiration of all men possessed of chivalry 
enough to see glory in self-sacrifice without regard to 
the worthiness of the cause in behalf of which the 
sacrifice was made. 

Edwards was born at East Windsor, Connecticut, 
on October s, 1703, now nearly two hundred years 
ago. He was the son of a clergyman, and from in- 
fancy his mind was directed quite abnormally into theo- 
logical controversy. At ten years of age, when he 
ought to have been perfecting himself in the game of 
marbles, he was writing a satirical paper against ma- 
terialism. At twelve, when a ball ought to have 
meant more to him than all the spheres in the uni- 
verse, and when a bat should have commended itself 
to his youthful imagination as the most effective im- 
plement of controversy, he was writing to Europe 
concerning the "Wondrous Way of the Working of 
the Spider "'—an excursion into natural science which 
reflected a natural but resolutely suppressed intellectual 
tendency of his mind. 

At the age of twelve he entered Yale College— then 
scarcely on the scholastic level of a modern high- 
school. At sixteen he was graduated as a bachelor of 
arts. During the next two years he studied theology 
at Yale. When nineteen years of age he was called to 
preach in a New York church, a post which he held for 
only eight months. He was at this time an almost 
morbid enthusiast in religion, "dedicating" himself to 
the " service of God " with a solemnity that clergymen 



3onatban Bs&war&s 347 

in good physical health in our time would sternly dis- 
courage in a boy under twenty years old. 

In 1721 — when twenty years old — he became a 
tutor at Yale. Two years later he accepted the assist- 
ant pastorate at Northampton, Massachusetts, where, 
a few years later, he succeeded to the full pastorate. 
Here his fame as a preacher grew apace, and for seven- 
teen years his relations were altogether happy. 

Then came, in 1744, the great trial of his life, out 
of which he came with unlimited credit to his con- 
science. Under his preaching and that of the evan- 
gelist Whitefield a remarkable "revival" occurred in 
New England, Northampton largely sharing in it. It 
speedily bred fanatical excesses, against which Edwards 
preached with all his logic, all his fervor, and all his 
healthful common sense, but to no avail. It is a mat- 
ter of historical record that great emotional religious 
excitement, when unrestrained by other and saner 
influences, tends to result in some form of sexual im- 
morality—not perhaps as a legitimate result of religious 
fervor, but as a quite illegitimate and most deplorable 
consequence of emotional excitement inadequately re- 
strained and left without proper direction. The Oneida 
community, with all its abominations, had its birth in 
what is still known as "the great revival." The Ger- 
man Muckers trace their history to a like occasion. 
The Mormon movement, originating in ill-regulated 
emotional fervor, culminated in licensed polygamy. 
Thus history emphasizes the truth already recognized 
by psychology, that the emotions are closely co-related, 



348 Sbe preachers 

that laughter and tears lie not far apart, and that when 
any impulse, however pure and _ abnormally 

5 the ::onal nature of men and women, some 
form of emotional immorality is apt to result. 

This is what happened in Jonatha i'sc 

_ ?gation. The details, even in that ieg vhich 

they were permitted, by a rigid censorship of utter- 

I bee ne kr are not p easa it :ess 

subir: ts scuss here. It came to Jonathan Ed- 

i'sl _ that improper literature ~ _ 

freely circulated among the men and women of his 
grregal th sue suits as ;rel : rjted 

in the emotionally excited conditions that he had 
diligently labored to prevent. 

the instinct of an honest man. fearless in the 
discharge of duty, and uncompromising in his devotion 
to morality, he insisted that a searching inquiry should 
be made into the facts. But men oi influence in the 
church objected. Prompted by or 

by other m s,as1 case might be 

_ s: :ess :hat might lead to a _ 

lal, injurious to the church. 

- > immeasurably honest mind 
this st compromise with unright- 

eousness, and he would h; I in it. R 

than soil his soul by participation in such a parley with 
iniq; ° his pastoral - surren- 

him the only m€ - 
of putting bread and butter in: :hs of his 

children and clothes upon their bac 



3onatban JEowarfcs 



349 



He was a man of truly heroic mould. He resolutely 
faced poverty and want and sore distress, rather than 
make terms of any kind with the forces of unrighteous- 
ness — rather than lend his countenance, even by in- 
direct implication, to evil. No hero of the sword could 
do a braver thing. No paladin ever proved his courage 
or his character more gloriously. 

Declining many offers of settlement in good parishes, 
in Scotland, in Virginia, and elsewhere, Edwards un- 
dertook a mission to the Indians. 

On February 16, 1758, he became President of the 
College of New Jersey— now Princeton University. He 
lived only thirty-four days thereafter, dying of small- 
pox on the 22d of March. 











WILLIAM ELLERY CHANGING 

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANGING was Mieofa 
remarkable group of thinkers, who did 
their work in obedience : theii c - 
sciences but in opposition to their intention. They 
wrought a revolution which they deprecated. They 
established a sect in direct opposition to their own pur- 
and. having established it. they did all they could 
to make it rather an influence in behalf of free thought 
in ot lan an organized exponent of the free 

thought formulated by itself. 

::erson contributed mightily to all the reforms 
of his time, from abolitionism to the emancipation of 
theology from its swaddling clothes, while denouncing 
and contemning all organized reform movements - 
unworthy 7 >ress s f self-seeking, so Channir. 
came the great apostle of liberal Christianity and the 
chief force in a radical movement while stoutly con- 
tending for conservatism, and loyally striving to pre- 
serve the old church organization intact in its unit}" and 
undisturbed in its supre 

The trouble with these men was that their minds 
: 



William Ellery Channing 



w 















William Elicit Cbanning 35' 

were dominated by a conscience which refused to sub- 
mit itself to their wills or to accommodate itself to their 
prejudices. 

Channing was the irresistibly eloquent and im- 
measurably persuasive orator of that movement of 
which Emerson was the thinker and Theodore Parker 
an apostle and evangelist. 

Channing's temper was sweetly sympathetic, almost 
beyond example. His love of truth was always un- 
compromising, but never unkindly or aggressive. 
There was no taint of arrogance in his intellectual pro- 
cesses, no suggestion of the dogmatist in his thinking. 
He loved truth and righteousness, and it was his 
endeavor in life to commend truth and righteousness 
to other men's minds, not only for the sake of truth 
and righteousness, but even more for the sake of other 
men's minds. For Channing loved men better than 
dogmas. He held humanity in higher esteem than 
human reason. He sought rather to make men feel 
aright than to compel their opinions to his standards. 

Human conduct was to him merely an evidence — 
and not always a conclusive evidence — of the moral 
conditions that inspired it ; and his concern as a per- 
suasive apostle of a rational religion was rather for the 
preservation of the religion than for the propagation of 
the rationalism. 

Most of his fellows in this movement were coldly 
rational ; he was warmly religious. They assailed the 
old dogmas with destructive intent ; he sought to amel- 
iorate them. They contended for rationalism in religion ; 



wbc pzcz: ; 

r — t: - t _ -. " s~ _ ~t; r.ii 

siasni for k«gk. he for piety. They, in putting aside their 
ancient beliefs, were chiefly concerned to destroy the 
• . :.: r . ■ -". : rue: : _:: :t - ■- _ ■ _ - 

prevail ; he was chiefly concerned to preserve all that 
could be saved from the wreck of the old faith, in order 
:.-:-■- --- - _.■-..:•.. 7 7-7 : - 7- 

- • 7 : ■ : . st h :r.e:" "'- r tit : se v-. ;- : .-. ; -.. T / 
with him sought to destroy, he sought to preserve and 
upbuild. He endeavored to engraft upon the new 
theology a loving belief in divine beneficence, and in 
all those " gifts of the Spirit." to employ his own pi 
v. r.zh tended to make men better in their characters 
and in their lives. 
■ 
Channing would have been an evangelist of ortho- 
His impulses were all in that direction, and only 
his intellectual environment turned him to an oppo- 
:_:: - " 

■_l:.:: - : " :: 

Personally he was a man to be esteemed without 
: : r his purity of soul and his absolute uprightness of 

7 : : 7 7: ir.i 7 77 ; ::: 
human sympathy. As an orator he was withe 
surer::: in the rers-isi.er.ess :: his . the 

ierfulness of his presentation of his thought and 
in the extraordinarily wimimg quafity of his voice and 

He was bom in Newport. R. I.. on April - 
He 7 7 eagre education that Hi 



TOlliam Ellcr^ Cbanning 353 

College afforded at the end of the eighteenth century, 
of which Mr. Justice Joseph Story has given us a 
detailed account— an education which conferred the 
bachelor of arts degree upon a basis of study far smaller 
than that now required for admission to the Freshman 
class of even the smallest and obscurest college in the 
country. He was graduated in 1798, and immediately 
afterwards went to Richmond, Virginia, to serve as 
tutor in the family of D. M. Randolph. There he fell 
in love with Virginian hospitality, and with the Vir- 
ginian breadth of view and practice respecting the pos- 
session of wealth. He looked upon slavery with 
abhorrence as did his employers, the Randolphs, and 
sympathized strongly with the desire then widely 
prevalent in Virginia to carry out Jefferson's ideas and 
bring about, in some orderly and safe fashion, the 
emancipation of the State from the incubus that had 
been imposed upon it by the greed of an earlier historic 
period. 

It was during this stay in Richmond, also, that 
Channing, in spite of the temptations of Virginia's 
groaning dinner-tables and of the indulgent lavishness 
of living then prevalent there, adopted an ascetic method 
of eating which permanently impaired his digestion and 
undoubtedly shortened his life, after making living 
itself, for many years, a pain to him. 

From Virginia he went hack to New England and 
became a divinity student at Harvard. In 180"; he was 
made pastor of the Federal Street Congregational 
Church, in Boston, where the peculiarly winning 



354 XTbc fl>rcacbcrs 

quality of his eloquence quickly brought him into 
popular favor. 

During all the years of his ministry in this church, 
Channing occupied a position of compromise between 
the old orthodoxy and the new Unitarianism. He held 
fast to the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ, while 
refusing to admit Christ's identity with God. He 
earnestly desired the old, while courageously accepting 
the new. His instincts were conservative, while his 
intellectual processes tended inexorably to the accept- 
ance of radical opinions. 

His teaching as a pulpit orator was at once reforma- 
tory and mystical. His influence was that of a leader 
of advanced thought on the one hand and a restraining 
force in behalf of orthodoxy on the other. With it all 
he was beloved as few preachers have ever been, and 
his influence was overmastering upon a generation of 
men whose intellects were in revolt against their 
inclinations. 

The same influence that he brought to bear in the 
pulpit was still more powerfully felt in his writings 
contributed to The Christian Examiner, the North 
American Review, and other periodicals in which the 
men of that time were trying to hold fast to the tradi- 
tions of religion while rejecting the fundamental as- 
sumptions on which those traditions rested. 

This is not the place in which to show in detail the 
nature and extent of the revolution in which, almost in 
spite of himself, Channing became both a leader and a 
formative influence. It suffices if we have made clear 



TCHilliam Ellen? Cbanning 



155 



his attitude of conscientious revolt against dogmas 
repellent to his mind, coupled with a conservative 
reverence for traditions that were dear to him by 
virtue of inherited association. 

He died on October 2, 1842, after an unsullied life 
of high endeavor in which conscience was always a 
dominant factor, but in which conscience itself was 
ameliorated by an abounding and all-embracing sym- 
pathy. 




Ht'NRY WARD BEECHER 

DURING the decade and a half o\ years that 
have passed since Henry Ward Beecher's 
death, men and women have got far enough 
away from the echoes of lus persuasive voice to esti- 
mate him with some degree of accuracy. 

lh.it he was a commanding force in human thought 
and affairs during the period of his activity is a tact 
admitting of no doubt. But while his published writ- 
ings include more than a score of titles, there is 
scarcely one of them that lias vitality of interest 
to-day. They were the works of a man essentially 
and almost exclusively an orator, a man who dealt 
always with the thought at the immediate moment 
uppermost in men's minds, and handled it. as the 
oiatoi always must do, in the temper ot" the pass- 
ing hour and with a view to immediate effect. Mr. 
Beecher mightily moved men's minds while he was 
living and speaking ; but his words survive only in 
echoes that have lost their resonance. His case illus- 
trates anew and strongly the truth that the orator, like 
the actor, howevei irresistibly he may appeal to those 




Henry Ward B< 









D 












. 



Ibenrp XXHart) Bcccber 357 

who hear him, leaves comparatively little behind him 
to bear witness of his might ; that spoken words, 
however eloquent, lose most of their force in the pro- 
cess of transference into print ; that the voice, and 
bearing, and personal presence of the orator are neces- 
sary adjuncts, without which his utterance must lose 
much of its virile influence. 

Mr. Beecher was never a closely logical thinker. 
Perhaps, if he had been, his oratory would not have 
been so great as it was, for, after all, the orator makes 
his appeal rather to the emotions of men than to their 
intellects, and carries their excited minds with him 
rather than convinces them by reasoning of the justice 
of his views. 

When Mr. Beecher spoke in antagonism to slavery, 
he pictured to men's minds the easily imagined horrors 
they would suffer if subjected to such a system, and 
the fervor of his speech took no account of the negro's 
radically different temperament and point of view as 
factors in the problem. Still less did he pause to 
consider the grave difficulties that lay in the path of 
statesmen who must deal with that subject, the con- 
stitutional structure of our government, with all its 
embarrassing limitations, and the still graver problems 
that perplexed Clay and other sincere advocates of 
gradual emancipation, who foresaw the difficulty of so 
adjusting affairs as to make freedom and enfranchise- 
ment compatible with orderly civil government by pop- 
ular suffrage in States where the most ignorant of the 
blacks outnumber the whites. As an orator, speaking 



358 Gbe Iprcacbers 

for a temporary purpose, Beecher put these considera- 
tions aside and forced upon his auditor the simple 
question : " How would you like to be a slave, 
owned in your body and life by another man whose 
arbitrary will you must recognize as law ? " 

All this is said, not in criticism but in exposition and 
in illustration of Mr. Beecher's methods, which were 
necessarily those of the orator, rather than those of 
the closely reasoning essayist or those of the states- 
man, who must take into account many limitations and 
many practical difficulties with which the orator need 
not concern himself. 

The orator doubtless convinces himself of the jus- 
tice of his cause before he begins to speak in its behalf. 
But when he once begins to speak, he feels himself 
free to put aside whatever stands in his way, to disre- 
gard all difficulties as "side issues," and to make the 
strongest appeal he can to human passion, with little 
or no regard to anything else. It is his function to 
persuade, and to that alone he devotes himself. He 
has no time for close and orderly reasoning, and if he 
be really an orator with the divine gift of all-moving 
speech, he has no liking for it. 

It was not only in the ways indicated that Mr. 
Beecher illustrated the disposition of his mind to put 
aside the harder things of logic, and to base belief 
rather upon inclination and impulse than upon nicely 
reasoned argument. 

While holding fast to all the premises of the old 
theology, instilled into him by his father, Mr. Beecher 



1benn> TKIlar& Bcecber 359 

led his church into an emotional revolt against the 
doctrine of eternal punishment. He once preached a 
sermon in which he frankly accepted the Darwinian 
theory of the Descent of Man, but at the same time 
declared his unquestioning faith in the doctrine of 
Christ's atonement. Thereupon a newspaper man 
asked him how he reconciled these two antagonistic 
things, pointing out that the doctrine of atonement 
rested upon the theory of man's fall, while the 
Darwinian theory was that the whole history of man 
had been the story, not of a fall, but of a gradual, con- 
tinuous, and law-directed advance, from protoplasmic 
conditions through the lower animal life into the full 
glory of manhood as we know it. Mr. Beecher's reply 
was characteristic. "Don't bother, my dear boy," 
he said; "we are bound to accept Darwin. All the 
evidence is with him. But we simply can't give up the 
doctrine of the atonement, and we won't. Let 's accept 
both and be happy. The two may be fundamentally 
irreconcilable, as you say, but what does it matter ? 
We must believe one and we love to believe the other. 
After all, we don't know much about it, and the main 
thing is to be happy, whatever happens. What 's the 
use of chopping logic ? " 

It is chiefly as an orator, therefore, that we must 
consider Mr. Beecher. And as an orator, as a man 
capable of moving, controlling, and inspiring men by 
his voice and words, he was unquestionably foremost 
even in a generation which included Henry Clay, 
Daniel Webster, Rufus Choate, and Wendell Phillips 



Cbv prcacbcr» 

among its men gues _ degree 

than any of these he influenced the thought, the emo- 
tions, the conduct of men. 

Through long years, from Plymouth pulpit, he 
: :ed to an audience of three thousand people, 
while other thousands waited outside in hope of rind- 
ing standing room somewhere whither his voice might 
pene: a lecturer the eagerness to hear him 

>o great that although he raised his price : 
hundred dollars a night he was compelled to reject the 
_ :er number of applications for his presence, on the 
ground that he had not time in which to address 

the multitudes that -ed to hear him. Yet 

if the desire to know what he thought had been the 
Inspiration, his stenographer might e 
fcisfie J these muhit u 

His career began simply enough. He was a son of 
Lyman Beecher. and was bom in Litchfield. Cor. -. . 
cut. on June :_ 813 - asedi the Boston 

Latin School. Mount Pleasant Institute, and Amherst 
College. He studied theology at the Lane Sen: 
and went to Indiana to preach in 1S-7. Ten years later 
he became pastor of Plymouth Church, in Bn>; 
and there made his reputation as a pulpit orator. 

His methods were wholly contrary to the traditions 
of his time. He put aside the frills and ftirbelo 
the pulpit and presented himself to his congregation 

man like unto themselves. He spoke ;i 
with a most tremendous earnestness of conviction and 
purpose, but he did not hesitate to :> ce tain 



1bcm\> lWarc> fficccber 361 

oratorical arts and artifices which, until then, had been 
deemed out of place in the pulpit and inconsistent 
with the solemnity befitting the preacher's high mis- 
sion. He freely indulged his sense of humor as a means 
of attracting and holding the attention of his congrega- 
tion. He drew from history, from biography, and from 
experience the most dramatic stories that could be used 
in illustration of his preaching, and he related them 
with an extraordinary histrionic skill. His sole con- 
cern was to impress his own thought upon the minds 
of those who listened and to win them to his point of 
view. In aid of that purpose he employed every con- 
ceivable art of oratory, suffering no consideration of 
dignity and no tradition of the pulpit to stand for one 
moment in his way. 

He made as little of creeds as of conventionalities, 
and if he had been a preacher commissioned by any 
well-ordered ecclesiastical authority he would almost 
certainly have been silenced for heresy at any one of a 
dozen points in his career. 

He was the first of the " political preachers." Hat- 
ing slavery with all his soul, he was not restrained 
from pulpit utterance in antagonism to it by the fact 
that it had become a question of party politics. He 
became a member of the anti-slavery party at its in- 
ception, and when it took form as the Republican 
party, with its machinery and its candidates, he 
preached its cause from the pulpit as unhesitatingly 
as he preached the doctrines of his religion. He went 
further and became a public speaker in that behalf, at 



302 Cbc preacbere 

cost oi much obloquy when he spoke for "'Sharp's. 
Rifles " in Kansas, but with great applause when, during 
the Civil War. he went to England to plead there for 
a revision of that popular opinion which at first set so 
strongly in favor of the Southern Confederacy. 

He once said to the present writer: " 1 have this 
advantage over most preachers of righteousness, that 
1 have always felt myself capable of all unrighteous- 
ness. 1 know what the impulses to wrong-doing are. 
because they are strong in my own being. When 1 
am called upon to attack wrong. 1 know in my own 
person all the details of its defensive works. 1 am 
familiar with every gun-room in its fortifications, every 
traverse it has built tor purposes of defence. It is the 
best equipment oi the preacher of righteousness to feel 
in himself all the impulses of unrighteousness, to be 
able to put himself into the place oi the wrong-doer 
or the wrong thinker, and to assail him from the van- 
tage-ground oi his own points oi view."' This ut- 
terance, quoted from memory, and imperfectly, no 
doubt, furnishes a sufficient key to that extraordinary 
influence which Beecher exercised so long as he 
lived, and which so completely died with him that 
not one of his published works is to-day a vital factor 
in human affairs. 

His influence, while he lived, was almost matchless 
in its extent and in its masterfulness. Now that he is 
dead, almost nothing remains of it. His persuasive- 
ness of speech appealed irresistibly to the minds oi the 
men who listened to his voice : to-day it survives only 



1bcnn> WIiar& Beecbcr 363 

as a memory in the minds of a rapidly passing gener- 
ation. It was as evanescent as the sound of the sea 
beating upon the shifting sands. The world has 
passed on to other questions than those that Beecher so 
passionately discussed. It is concerning itself with mat- 
ters quite apart from those that engaged his mind. The 
voice of the orator is silent, and the echo of his eloquence 
is dying out of the ears to which it made its appeal. 

To record this truth is in no way to discredit the 
work or the public service of the orator. It is only to 
define it and to point out its necessary limitations. 

The later life of Mr. Beecher was embittered by a 
controversy that involved the question of his integrity 
and his purity. Theodore Tilton, in the public prints 
and in a suit at law, accused Mr. Beecher of gross and 
criminal immorality. At the trial, both sides seemed 
to shrink somewhat from a full revelation of the facts, 
whatever they may have been. After a hearing of six 
months, the jury found itself unable to reach a verdict, 
and when the trial was over there was a like division of 
opinion among the people, especially those whose opin- 
ions were of consequence, including the leading minis- 
ters of the church to which Mr. Beecher belonged. 

This coldly impartial statement is perhaps all that 
need be made in an essay like this concerning a mat- 
ter the very mention of which must be grievously 
distressing to all honest and generous minds. 

Mr. Beecher lived in full health and vigor of mind and 
body until his seventy-fifth year, when he was stricken 
with apoplexy, and died on the 8th of March, 1887. 



THE PHILANTHROPISTS AND EDUCATORS 



4J§ 
til 


fY^SVJ^^V 







M 



GEORGE PEABODY 

R. GLADSTONE said of George Peabody that 
" he taught the world how a man may be the 
master of his fortune and not its slave." To 
men of great possessions he set an example by which 
many of them in this later time are wisely profiting. 
He did his giving while he was still in vigor of life and 
able to direct his benefactions wisely to the ends in- 
tended, instead of postponing them until death, and 
thus making of his fortune a lure to lawyers. 

Further than this, he did not withhold his hand from 
generosity until the work of accumulation was finished. 
He began his giving early and continued it to the end. 
His benefactions were oft-recurring incidents in his 
career of money-making, and not, as is usually the 
case, a sort of belated supplement. He gave while yet 
he was engaged in the work of making, not waiting till 
the instinct of accumulation should be satiated before 
seeking enjoyment in the exercise of the instinct of 
bestowing. 

Moreover, he distributed in patriotic and philan- 
thropic ways an astonishingly large proportion of his 
367 



368 Cbe philanthropists ani> Educators 

total wealth. Other men have given away larger 
sums than he did, particularly in our day of accumula- 
tions vaster than any he ever dreamed of; but few if 
any ever bestowed upon purposes helpful to others so 
great a proportional share of their total possessions. 
We pay well-deserved honor to a multi-millionaire who 
has lavished ten millions in a single year in bestowing 
public benefits, and reflect that the sum represents all 
but two or three millions of the giver*s income during 
that year from secure investments, leaving him only a 
little richer at the end of the year than he was at its 
beginning. What, then, should be our attitude of mind 
towards a man like Peabody, who gave away, not only 
his income, but quite two thirds of the total accumula- 
tions of his lifetime ? 

As nearly as can be reckoned George Peabody made 
about fifteen million dollars by his lifework. Of that 
sum he gave away about ten millions in beneficence. 
And his beneficence was as wise in its direction as it 
was liberal in its amount. He was as diligent and as 
sagacious in the distribution of his wealth as he had 
been in its gathering. He took as much pains with his 
benefactions as he had ever taken with his invest- 
ments. He worked as hard to make his gifts lastingly 
productive of the good he intended as he had ever 
worked to make his money-earning enterprises yield 
their full meed of profit. 

He was not content to bestow money upon philan- 
thropic or humanly unlifting enterprises : he invested 
in those enterprises, laboriously planning to make 



George Peabody 



(Beoroc IPcalxtop 369 

them yield a perpetual harvest of good, so that to-day 
the sums he bestowed are as fruitful of the good to 
which he devoted them as they were when first dedi- 
cated to beneficent ends. A generosity so wisely 
ordered is not at all to be measured by the figures that 
set forth merely the sums thus invested in perpetual 
good works. It is not too much to say, that rightly 
judged, George Peabody was the greatest of philan- 
thropists, the one who most freely gave of his time, 
his industry, his sagacity, and his experience, as well 
as of his money, for the betterment of his fellow-men. 

George Peabody was born on February 18, 179s, 
at Danvers, Massachusetts. The town has since fit— 
ingly taken the name Peabody, in honor of its most 
illustrious son. The only schooling he ever had was 
got before he was eleven years old. At that age he 
began his business career as a clerk in a country store. 
After serving in that capacity in several towns, he was 
entrusted by his uncle with the entire charge of a 
store in Georgetown, District of Columbia. At the 
age of nineteen he was admitted t<> partnership in a 
dry goods establishment in Baltimore of which, with 
its branches, he ultimately became the head. 

In this business he accumulated money and experi- 
ence, and in 1817, with a large knowledge of affairs, 
he sought a broader field of activity in London, where 
he established himself as a banker, founding the house 
of George Peabody & Co. in 1841. Before he went 
to London to live he had demonstrated his genius for 
finance by negotiating in [835 a Maryland loan for 



Civ pbilaiitbcopists anc educators 

attempts to aa :plish the 
purpose had been baffled by the State's lack of ci 
He had also begun his career as a liberal giver to pub- 
lic purposes, by refusing to accc: the cor 
pao due to him on the negotiation of the State 

bove. 
In London Peab s sagacit as; . -:ker rapidly 
but there is little to 
. ceming that part of his career, except that his 
patriotism in investing heavily in United States 
ernme t B is, di g the st - ld-stj ess 

5 greal gains. 

It is as j _ rather than as j 
that the si _ - teresting, and 

that part of his riograp st startling as his 

generosil - sufficiently told in a few - 

pie words and ekx fig 25 

. h . shed the arrang g 

_ : )it at the first V 

Fair. In: also he gave the first of tri s< 

nificent Fourth of Jul) dinners 

annually repeated till the end of his life, and which 
did much I stimulate fi ends for our cou 

g the g eatest and most influential mc 
land. In 1852 1m - edition 

tribul S ig the same yes 

he _ v - ; . the Peabody Institute in 

-.ent which he after wards 
creased to $2 . a -- nort 

stitutc 1 South Da - B57 he founded the 



d$eor<je Ipcaboop 37' 

Peabody Institute in Baltimore, which, then and later, 
he endowed to the extent of $1,000,000. At the same 
time he gave $2=1,000 each to Kenyon College in Ohio, 
and Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts. 

Meantime, Peabody had his pity for the condition 
of the London poor strongly aroused, and after a 
painstaking study of the conditions he instituted the 
wisest and most beneficent <»f all his projects for the 
betterment of his fellow-men. His plan was to build 
tenement- or lodging-houses in which the industrious 
poor could find wholesome and comfortable homes at 
a cost not greater than the rents they had before been 
paying for squalid, pestilential, and indecently crowded 
tenement quarters. In common with other students 
of the problems of human betterment, he was con- 
vinced that the first and chief requisite was to take the 
poor out of their squalid and unwholesome kennels, 
and give them decent homes in which the conditions 
should be such as to stimulate them to endeavor for the 
improvement of their lives. His purpose was to give 
the poor a chance, and by demonstration to prove to 
other landlords the possibility of making profit by 
building a better kind of habitation for the toilers than 
any that had previously existed. To this inestimably 
beneficent purpose, Peabody gave no less than S2,=>oo,- 
000, and he gave something better than that to his 
charity. He gave his time, his minute knowledge of 
conditions, his wisdom in human nature, and hisextraor- 
dinary business sagacity. His benefaction provided 
comfortable homes for more than twenty thousand 



372 Cbe pbilantbropiste anfr Educators 

people of the class most in need of such help and 
most likely to be benefited by its bestowal. 

In [866, Peabody came again to his native country. 
and again he " came bearing gifts " of surprising mu- 
rjificence. Three hundred thousand dollars he devoted 
to the establishment o\ institutes of archaeology at 
Yale and Harvard. He gave at the same time $2,100.- 
000 in aid ot education in the Southern States of the 
Union, and three years later he increased this sum 
to $3, ^00.000. Other educational and charitable pur- 
poses were benefited to the extent of S200.000 dur- 
ing his visit of 1 s 

Congress rendered fitting thanks to him for his 
munificence, and on his return to England the Queen 
desired to mark her appreciation of his good works by 
creating him a baronet. He declined that honor, but 
her Majesty was not satisfied to let the matter rest 
there. She caused Peabody to be asked what she 
could give him in token of her desire to do him public 
honor, and he expressed a wish for a simple letter from 
the Queen. " which." he said. " 1 may carry across the 
) and deposit as a memorial of one of her most 
faithful sons." The letter, written by the Queen's 
own hand, was accompanied by the additional gift of a 
portrait of herself, and both are cherished in the Pea- 
body Institute, in the native town oi the man they 
were meant to honor. 

A little later, Peabody permanently endowed an art 
school in Rome. In 1869 he visited the United States 
for the last time, adding largely to his former benefac- 



(Bcoroc fl>cabo&p 373 

tions : establishing a museum at Salem, Massachu- 
setts, and giving more than §iso,ooo to other public 
purposes. 

On his return to England he found that he had been 
honored there by the erection, in London, of a noble 
bronze statue of himself, the work of the American 
sculptor, W. W. Story, unveiled by the Prince of 
Wales with every public manifestation of the uni- 
versal honor in which the prince of philanthropists was 
held in his adopted country. 

Then came death to end the splendidly beneficent 
career, on November 4, 1869. And then came, from the 
two great English-speaking nations of the world, 
which he had so greatly honored and benefited by his 
philanthropy, such tributes to his memory as had never 
before been paid to a private personage. Great Britain 
put aside all traditions and all precedents in offering a 
grave for George Peabody in Westminster Abbey, and 
there, in fact, his funeral was celebrated. But, in ac- 
cordance with his own wish in life, his body was 
brought to America for burial by the side of that of 
his mother. 

But so great and so universal was the desire in 
both countries to pay tribute to the memory of this 
man that the British Government detailed the finest 
frigate in that country's navy to bear the body home 
in state, while, on our side, Admiral Parragut in person 
commanded the squadron appointed by this govern- 
ment to receive it. 



PETER COOPER 

ABOU BEN ADHEM > c a ri " be set down as 
loves his telle - as I 

better founded than Peter v~ >ers 1 tie to a 
iisl ction. As a philanthropist Ik 5 I con- 
tent to give money lavishly in aid of others 
ght to bear upon his giving as ge Peat 

thai - _ cil which had won fortune for him- 
self, all that practical knowledge of the work a 

lich his own experience, first as himself a 

is as a large employer of 

_ d given 1 him. 

His t - mere gifts dn m from 

?rfluous wealth. The;. . s< 5 of help 

scan telligently wrought 

s lad been the >rises which his _ >os- 

sessions t was s purpose to 

s I s tile end 

to relieve . st 

severity to-morrow. His plan of beneficence was - 

lelping nen t help 
selves. Heen< togivetotlu leedy not 



Peter Cooper 

From a steel engraving 



A 


















IPeter Cooper 375 

the unearned rewards of industry, but such equipment 
as should enable the beneficiaries of his bounty to earn 
reward for themselves by industry of their own. 

His own strangely varied career had taught him, 
far better than most men ever learn, the conditions 
under which endeavor achieves success, the equip- 
ment that is necessary to hopeful industrial effort. 
He knew, as few men have ever known, the actual 
educational needs of men and women who have only 
their hands and eyes and physical capacities as their 
means of subsistence, and it was intelligently to meet 
and satisfy these needs that he did his great works of 
charity. 

His career was typically American. Beginning with 
nothing he achieved the best that he sought. With- 
out capital, without schooling, without assistance of 
any sort, he managed to do conspicuously well those 
things which are commonly supposed to be possible 
only to trained intelligence supported by adequate 
means. 

He was born the son of a poor hatter in New York 
City, on February 12, [791. His only education was 
secured during a single year of half-day sessions at a 
very common school. While still a mere child he 
went into the hat shop and completely learned the 
trade of fashioning headgear as that trade was then 
practised. A little later he was employed in a brewery 
at Peekskill. After a brief time we find him in the 
Catskills, still a mere boy, engaged again in making 
hats, and afterwards in moulding bricks. Hat-making 



3/6 £bc IPbilantbropists anc» Educators 

in Brooklyn, brewing at Newburgh, and other occupa- 
tions followed in disorderly and rather purposeless suc- 
cession, under the vacillating direction of the boy"s 
apparently irresolute and incapable father, until at the 
age of eighteen years Peter was regularly apprenticed 
to a carriage-maker. 

But although he had mastered that trade and even 
made an important invention in connection with it, 
young Cooper, when his apprenticeship expired, de- 
clined to follow it. His natural mechanical gifts had by 
this time been supplemented by skill in the working of 
wood and iron, and for the exercise of this skill and of 
his natural ingenuity he sought, in a machine shop, a 
larger opportunity than wagon-making could offer. For 
a time he made cloth-shearing machines in a factory 
which he had himself set up. Then he made cabinet 
work. Soon afterwards he removed from Long Island 
to New York and established a grocery. He next began 
that business of glue-making which he continued, in 
connection with other enterprises, throughout his life. 
Little by little he added other products to his glue, and 
little by little he acquired wealth in the business. 

In 1S2S he went to Baltimore, where he established 
iron works, solved some of the most difficult problems 
of American railroad operation, designed and built the 
first locomotive engine ever constructed in America, and 
rescued from bankruptcy the only railroad then existing 
in the United States— the Baltimore & Ohio line. To 
say that he constructed the first American locomotive 
is very inadequately to record that achievement. It 



Ipctcr Cooper 377 

was easily possible for American railroad projectors to 
buy from England as many locomotives as they might 
need. But practical experiment showed that those 
locomotives could not haul trains over the steep grades 
and sharp curves which marked the Baltimore & Ohio 
road, and which then seemed necessary to the con- 
struction of all railroads in America. Nor could British 
mechanics adapt their engines to such American uses. 
The Baltimore & Ohio road had been built at an expense 
that practically exhausted the resources of those in 
control of it. It could not be operated with any ma- 
chinery then known. Either it must be abandoned and 
its enormous cost thrown away, or some new and 
practically available form of locomotive engine, adapted- 
to its peculiar conditions, must be devised. That is 
what Peter Cooper achieved in 1830, and from his labors 
to that end he realized what was then regarded as a 
great fortune. 

From that time forward, Cooper devoted himself 
largely to the conduct of iron foundries, rolling-mills, 
and machine shops in New York, Pennsylvania, and 
New Jersey, becoming one of the great "captains of 
industry " of his age, and originating many new uses 
for iron, among them the substitution of iron for wooden 
beams in architectural work and bridge-building. 

He was the early advocate of an Atlantic cable line, 
and in the hour of its sorest need, when faith in the pos- 
sibility of ocean telegraphing sank to zero, he supplied, 
out of his own private means, the money with which 
the work was ultimately carried to completion. Thus 



Cbc philanthropist* ane educators 

he was the real fathei f cean telegraphy. It was his 

faith, rather than that o\ Cyrus Field, that carrier 
enter? s« I : npletion. and the poem "HowCynis 
Laid the Cable " ought properly to have celebrated Peter 
5 ts hero. 
Having made his fortune, and having established his 
various enterprises so that their conduct might safely be 
left to the superintendence of others. Peter C 
voted himself for the remainder o\ his life to his _ 
philanthrop c k :f providing others with that 

: :-f brain and eye and hand which renders 
the .'■ I the t of any- 

laking of them perso:> - capable of 
rendering service to the world that the world in its 
5 eager the ssisl [ 

- 5 se n mind, he creal 

ere a free g- - .ould 

furnish all that be ksc sup struct ..here 

free lectures iciena itry s 

I manner m the best rsults 

f in vestigatior 

~ _ should furnish to men and 

dons for " " 

g of the < telled 

deftness *s its fort 

sess the fit accomp shment of any task that 

■ tself. 

sdom o\ his varied experience ir. . 
s c rdered this beneficence of his that it 
should be forever self-s - tempi g those who 



IPctcr Cooper 379 

should come after him, indeed, to enlarge its useful- 
ness with lavish gifts of their own, but not leaving 
it in any degree dependent upon their impulses of 
generous giving. Having bought a suitable plot of 
ground, he built his institute in such form that the 
rentals from those parts of it that could not in any 
case be used directly for its purposes should forever 
and increasingly furnish an annual income for its 
support. To this he added an endowment fund, thus 
rendering his benefaction secure against all hazards 
of circumstance. 

Peter Cooper's Americanism was intense, instinctive, 
all-mastering. He believed in his country, its institu- 
tions, its people, its past, its present, its future, its 
achievements, and its aspirations. He was a democrat 
in the fullest and best sense of the term. His belief was 
in the people, not in a class. His concern was for the 
great masses of men and women who do the world's 
work, not for the few who assume to direct their 
endeavors and appropriate to themselves the pecuniary 
rewards of other men's labors. 

He lived simply, honestly, and always in most 
neighborly fashion. He had an encouraging word for 
every effort that sought human benefit, and his inter- 
est in the betterment of human conditions knew no 
abatement, even to the end of a life that covered no 
less than ninety-two years, one month, and twenty- 
two days. 



HORACE MANN 



AS lawyer, statesman, legislator, codifier, trav- 
eller, and college president, Horace Mann led 
a variedly active life which was fruitful of 
good in many and diverse directions. But his fame 
rests solely and justly upon the work he did for educa- 
tion in this republic of ours. 

He was the very first to appreciate at its full value 
the necessity of popular education in a republic gov- 
erned by the suffrage, a nation in which every man 
has a vote, and in which the masses must always out- 
number the classes, a nation in which the course and 
policy of government must always be directed by the 
will of the people, whether that will be well or ill 
informed. He was the first, also, to realize what and 
how much education includes and what it means, the 
first to divorce school training from its traditions of 
routine acquirement, and to awaken men's minds to a 
due appreciation of its function in training the char- 
acter as well as the intellect, and fitting the young 
for the efficient discharge of the duties of mature man- 
hood and womanhood. He was the first serious ad- 



Hoi 



Mann 



A 



Iboiacc fIDann 381 

vocate of rational methods in American education ; 
the first to see how far the teacher might increase his 
influence for good by making himself the friend and 
companion of his pupils, where by tradition he had 
been their enemy to be hated, their taskmaster to 
be thwarted whenever juvenile ingenuity was equal to 
that undertaking. 

How great a work of school amelioration he did, it 
is difficult for men and women of this generation to 
imagine, or even to understand upon explanation. 
When he set his face against flogging he was met by 
the very angry antagonism of the whole schoolmaster 
class. He was denounced as an enemy of all success- 
ful teaching, as a visionary enthusiast who would rob 
the school of that discipline of terror on which alone 
it had up to that time relied as a means of compelling 
the mastery of dull tasks, stupidly assigned by learned 
unintelligence. When he recognized the rights of 
childhood and urged that they be respected, he was 
jeered at as an impractical dreamer and a pestilent 
revolutionizer of the established order of things. 
When he urged the gentle and loving training of the 
very young through appeals to their natural instincts 
of interest in the wonderful world into which they had 
been born, the whole army of schoolmasters, backed 
by all the mongers of catechisms and all the devotees 
of Solomon's-rod rule, opposed him as a vain dreamer 
of mad, disturbing schemes of innovation. 

But Horace Mann, with his keen insight into hu- 
man nature, with his enlightened mind and broad 



382 £bc philanthropists and Educators 

sympathies, and, above all. with that resistless force 
which enthusiasm brings to the aid of every genuine 
apostle of reform, was more than a match for all the inter- 
ests and all the prejudices that opposed him. It is no 
exaggeration to call him the founder and father and insti- 
gator of all that is best in modern American methods of 
education ; it is not too much to say of him that he 
wrought that educational revolution which has put 
reason and kindly interest into the seats once occupied 
by brute force, substituted intelligence for passion in 
school government, and made of teaching a profession 
in which the best men and women among us may 
engage with self-respecting enthusiasm. The influence 
of Horace Mann is dominant to-day in every school, 
public and private, throughout the land, and it is an 
influence of inestimable beneficence. 

Horace Mann was born of very poor parents, in 
Franklin, Massachusetts, on May 4. [796. He earned 
his own education by hard work, and extremely 
meagre living, and after his graduation from Brown 
University in iSiq he devoted himself for a time to 
teaching. In 1823 he was admitted to the bar. In 1 ^27 
he was elected to the State Legislature, where, during 
the next six years, he took an active part, especially in 
all legislation that concerned education, public or private. 
In 1833 he removed to Boston, where, during the same 
year, he was elected to the Massachusetts Senate, of 
which he became presiding officer four years later. 

His great work for education began in 1837, when 
he was made Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of 



"Iboracc fIDann 383 

Education. In that capacity, during the next eleven 
years, he was a tireless worker for the betterment of 
all schools. He secured important reforms in the State 
school laws. He brought about the establishment of 
normal schools for the training of a fitter class of teach- 
ers than then existed. He instituted teachers' conven- 
tions in all the counties, the purpose of which was to 
stimulate among teachers an intelligent enthusiasm in 
their work, and to improve methods by a free inter- 
change of opinions and experiences. He discouraged 
the use of corporal punishment in schools, and, despite 
angry resistance, succeeded at last in abolishing that 
abominable relic of barbarism. He instituted a system 
of school statistics, the first ever known in America, 
and in other ways sought to give unity and systematic 
purpose to educational work. 

He went to Europe at his own expense, and 
brought back a rich harvest of observation for the en- 
lightenment of American educators. He quickly made 
of Massachusetts, so far as the masses of the popula- 
tion were concerned, the best-educated State in the 
Union, with the clearly foreseen result that the educa- 
tors and the public authorities of other States began 
eagerly to learn of Massachusetts the lessons he had 
taught. If some of them have since notably bettered 
the instruction and taken the lead even of Massa- 
chusetts, it may be fairly assumed that that, too, was a 
result contemplated by the great apostle of educational 
reform. It was at any rate inevitable as a result of the 
great work he had done in Massachusetts. 



384 cl?c pbUantbroptets anb Cbucatore 

He has himself left the best record of the diligence 
with which he did that work. He wrote : 

"From the time 1 accepted the secretaryship in 
June, 18*7. until Maw 1S4S. when 1 tendered my resig- 
nation of it. 1 labored in this cause an average of not 
less than fifteen hours a day. From the beginning to 
the end of this period 1 never took a single day for 
relaxation, and months and months together passed 
without my withdrawing a single evening to call upon 
a friend." 

When he resigned his secretaryship, his great life- 
work was fully done. He had wrought the revo- 
lution intended. He had not only sowed the seed, but 
had seen it spring into lusty life and grow under his 
careful cultivation into a vigor that no adverse influ- 
ence could threaten with impairment. The rest was 
for others to do. 

From 1S4S till [853, Horace Mann served in Con- 
gress, acquitting himself there, as everywhere else, with 
abundant credit. But in comparison with his educa- 
tional reform work, his congressional activity was in- 
significant in its fruitage. In 1852 he was defeated as 
a candidate for governor of Massachusetts, and in the 
same year he became president of Antioch College, 
an obscure coeducational institution at Yellow Springs, 
in Ohio. He died there on August 2. 1859. He left 
behind him. as a heritage o\ the American people, a 
legacy of beneficence such as it is the fortune of few 
men to <rive to those who come after them. 



THE INVENTORS 



ROBERT FULTON 

THERE are many points of close and interesting 
similarity in the life stories of Robert Fulton, 
the father of the steamboat, and S. F. B. Morse, 
the father of the telegraph. Both began life as artists. 
Both were miniature- and portrait-painters while yet 
mere boys under age. Both became pupils of Benja- 
min West. Both drifted into science and invention 
through accidental association. Each invented a vari- 
ety of quite dissimilar contrivances. Each made one 
supreme invention which mightily ministered to that 
facility of human intercourse which is the harbinger 
and chief agency of civilization. Each was forced to 
face disputes as to the originality and priority of his 
invention, and to each the only harvest from his labors 
for long years was a multitude of costly and vexatious 
lawsuits. Finally each was destined to receive un- 
stinted honor in spite of rivalries and jealousies, each 
being everywhere popularly recognized as in effect 
the inventor of that which he claimed. 

Robert Fulton was born in Lancaster County, Penn- 
sylvania, in the year 170s. When only seventeen years 
337 



388 Cbe Inventors 

of age the untutored country boy went to Philadelphia, 
where he achieved immediate success as a painter of 
portraits, miniatures, and landscapes. Before reaching 
his majority he had earned money enough by his art 
to purchase a farm for his widowed mother, and to 
justify him in going abroad for study. 

In England he became the pupil oi Benjamin West, 
and so far perfected himself in his art as to secure 
rich commissions from wealthy and titled personages. 
It was in the practice oi his art that he became favor- 
ably acquainted with Earl Stanhope and the Duke oi 
Bridge water, two noblemen who had achieved dis- 
tinction as inventors. Stanhope oi an improved print- 
ing-press, and Bridgewater of new methods oi canal 
construction. In association with these two men. 
Fulton's mind was directed towards mechanical and 
engineering problems, especially in connection with 
navigation. He invented a system oi inclined planes 
to take the place oi locks in canal navigation : a new 
device for cutting marble : a system oi cast-iron acque- 
ducts and bridges; a flax-spinning machine : and several 
new types oi watercraft. He was one of the earliest 
advocates of that system oi canals which afterwards 
contributed so greatly to New York's commercial 
supremacy. He published treatises in London urging 
the commercial advantage and necessity oi canals, 
and these he pressed upon American attention, par- 
ticularly as to New York's need and opportunity in 
that respect. All this was in the latter end oi the 
eighteenth century. 



IRobert jfulton 389 

In 17Q4 Fulton went to France and there painted 
the first panorama ever exhibited in that country. 
Three years later we find him engaged in constructing 
a submarine torpedo-boat of his own invention— 
which, after repeated trials by the French and English 
governments, was rejected by both. The craft would 
sink below the surface of the water and rise again at 
the will of its inventor ; but its utmost speed under 
water was only five miles an hour, and it had not 
power enough to stem any considerable current. 

About 1800 Fulton returned to the United States 
where he continued his experiments with torpedoes 
and other war contrivances, for which Congress fur- 
nished a fund. But his chief attention at this time was 
given to the problem of steam navigation, on which he 
had been at work, at intervals, for more than ten years. 
While he was yet in France, he had experimented 
with a steamboat on the Seine, but unsatisfactorily. 
On his return to America he seriously set himself 
to work on this problem, and on August 11, 1807, his 
steamboat Clermont made the passage from New York 
to Albany in thirty hours. From that time forward 
the boat made regular trips, and others of an improved 
type were added later. 

Fulton's claim to the honor of originating the 
steamboat was hotly contested by many rivals at the 
time, and controversy on that subject has not even yet 
quite subsided or lost all of its acrimony. The facts 
bearing upon the matter seem to be as follows : 

As soon as the steam-engine was invented by Watt, 



39° Che Inventors 

many men of ingenious minds began to busy them- 
selves in devising practical applications of the newly 
harnessed power. Naturally, much attention was 
given to devices by which to make the steam-engine 
propel vessels, that being the most obviously desirable 
use to make of it. At many widely separated places 
inventors were simultaneously at work upon that 
problem, with varying degrees of partial success. In 
[788 John Fitch's experiments on the Delaware 
resulted in the navigation of a boat for a distance 
of twenty miles. Three years earlier Rumsey had 
achieved partial success on the Potomac. John C. 
Stevens of Hoboken, New Jersey, experimented with 
some success : and in 1704 Samuel Morev navigated a 
steamboat from Hartford to New York. Other experi- 
menters there were, but none except those mentioned 
achieved results worthy of serious consideration. 

Unquestionably Fitch, Stevens, and Morey antici- 
pated Fulton in the more or less successful con- 
struction of steamboats : but no one of them brought 
his devices to such perfection as to make the steam- 
boat as a vehicle of commerce an accomplished fact. 
That is what Fulton did. and it is for that that he is hon- 
ored. It was in recognition of this, his great service to 
commerce and civilization, that the United States Gov- 
ernment, in 1S14. gave his name to the first steam 
war-ship ever built in the world. 

On the 24th of February. 1815, the inventor passed 
away, leaving unfinished what he regarded as the most 
important part of his life-work, namely, the construe- 



IRobcrt jfulton 39' 

tion of a practical submarine torpedo-boat. Upon that 
undertaking he was busily engaged when his last ill- 
ness came upon him. 

Fulton will always be held in honor as one of the 
great benefactors of mankind. Doubtless the steam- 
boat, and its successor, the ocean-going steamship, 
would have come into being without him. But the 
fact remains that it was he who first practically solved 
the problem of steam navigation, and the fame of his 
achievement is surely none too great if we measure 
it by the stupendous results that have flowed from his 
labors. 




SAMUEL FINLEY BREESE MORSE 

IT is as the inventor of the telegraph that Samuel Fin- 
ley Breese Morse has been assigned a place in the 
Hall of Fame. His selection for that honor in 
preference to Joseph Henry, and to the exclusion of 
Henry, is sharply criticised in many quarters. Indeed, 
from the time of Morse's first success until now there 
has been much and very acrimonious controversy as to 
the rival claims of the two men to be considered the 
inventor in that case. Without entering into that con- 
troversy,— concerning which there is no newly discov- 
ered fact to be stated, and no new argument to be 
advanced,— it will be sufficient in this paper to set forth 
briefly the essential facts of the matter and the conten- 
tions that'have been based upon them. 

It should be borne in mind that many students of 
electricity about the year 1810 were- independently 
working upon the problem of electro-magnetic tele- 
graphing, and it would be surprising indeed if no two 
of them had wrought upon substantially identical lines, 
duplicating each other's ideas in whole or in part. 

According to his biographers, Morse's attention was 
392 










Samuel Finley Breese Morse 

From the painting by Alonzo Chappel 



Samuel Jfinlcp JSrccsc fIDorse 393 

first directed to the matter as one offering practical 
possibilities, during a sea voyage in October, 1812. 
He devised the dot-and-dash alphabet, now every- 
where employed, before the voyage was ended, but he 
did not produce his first working model until the year 
1835. 

In the meantime, in 1828, Joseph Henry had devised 
and exhibited in use the electro-magnet, upon which 
all telegraphing primarily depends. In 18^0 he in- 
vented the "intensity magnet," without which electric 
impulses could not be sent over long distances. In 
1811 Professor Henry published a paper suggesting the 
use of this device in the transmission of telegraphic sig- 
nals. During the same year he constructed at Prince- 
ton an electro-magnetic telegraph one mile long, over 
which he transmitted signals which were sounded at 
the further end by the tapping of a bell. 

All this was a full year, and much of it two or three 
years, before Morse began his experiments. But it is 
by no means a necessary inference, as some have con- 
tended, that Morse knew of Henry's achievements or 
borrowed his results. In any case, two tacts of the 
highest importance stand to Morse's credit : he first of 
all men devised a practical telegraphic alphabet, and it 
was he who first established a telegraph line for the 
actual transmission of messages. 

Morse was a man of extraordinary versatility of 
mind. He won distinction, indeed, in two departments 
of endeavor — art and science — which are usually ac- 
counted almost antagonistic to each other in impulse 



394 ttbc Inventors 

and in method. It" he had not won fame from the 
telegraph he would still have been remembered as a 
famous painter and sculptor. His achievement in the 
practical application of science to human needs has 
o\ ershadowed his earlier work in art. and in the pop- 
ular estimation at least the latter holds small place. 
And yet it was sufficiently notable to have won for 
him in 1813 a place among the twelve most successful 
contributors to the British Royal Academy's exhibition, 
besides other honors both at home and abroad. 

Morse was born at Charlestown, Massachusetts, on 
the 27th of April. 1791, and was graduated from "tale 
College in the Class of 1810. Even while an under- 
graduate he earned money by painting miniatures and 
cutting out those silhouettes in black which were 
greatly esteemed in the early years of the nineteenth 
century. After graduation he studied painting under 
V\ ashington Allston. going with him to London, where 
he also had Benjamin West for a master. Two years 
later, in iSr>. while Britain was at war with the United 
States, the young American art student won high 
honor in the Royal A< :!i his pic- 

ture T D . d a little later received the 

gold medal of the Adelphi Society for the plaster 
model which he had fashioned to aid him in the paint- 
ing. After painting some portraits Morse returne 
America in 1S1-. and meeting with small encourage- 
ment and smaller success in his Boston studio, he be- 

s .'.peripatetic portrait painter, first V .. E ..land 
and later in the South. In this department of art he 



Samuel Jfinlcy Breesc fIDorsc 395 

was abundantly successful, especially in Charleston, 
South Carolina, where, in spite of his tireless industry 
;it the easel, his commissions outran his ability to exe- 
cute them, sometimes by as many as one hundred 
and fifty orders in advance. Among the portraits 
painted about this time were those of President Mon- 
roe for the city of Charleston, Lafayette for the city 
of New York, and Fitz Greene Halleck, now owned by 
the Astor Library. Meantime Morse was busy in his 
spare moments in works of mechanical invention. 

In [823 Morse opened a studio in New York, which 
city and its neighborhood remained his home lor the 
rest of his long life. There he became in effect the 
founder and first president of the National Academy of 
Design, and won much applause by his occasional lec- 
tures on art. 

In 182Q he went to Paris for further study, remain- 
ing there for three years. It was on the return voyage 
in 1832 that his attention was first strongly directed to 
the subject of electro-magnetic telegraphing, and in 
this fact we have a positive, if not a conclusive argu- 
ment against the hypothesis that his experiments and 
results were consciously or unconsciously borrowed 
from those of Joseph Henry. It is extremely unlikely. 
to say the least, that Morse, studying art in Paris, — 
then a month away from our shores, had learned 
there anything of what Henry was doing with electro- 
magnets in the seclusion of a mid-Jersey college. And 
this improbability is rendered all the stronger by the 
fact that Henry's attitude toward his work was not at 



C k I itc iters 

all that of the inventor, looking for what are called 
:al results, but altogether that of the scientific 
t *:_.: - engaged in a dis tor 

truth. 

The newspapers of that time made no chronicle of 
I the modest scientist at Princeton was doing. 
Henry himself at no time exploited his» 
outside the college campus nothing was known of 
either his methods or the results atl hem 

Henry himself in due season set forth his 
conclusions in the proceedings of learned soc iel 
He was studying the phenomena of electricity, not 
: l telegraph, though he referred in one 
------ 

ultir .rlegraphic 

iceived the idea of dectro-magnetic 
teteg > e busied himself with the invent 

an apparatus 
his dot-and-dash alphabet This 

".of clock- _ _ 

paper, on which a:: ang and falling, marked 

the dots and dashes. For some 
lishment of telegraphic lines all mess: ges ere :hus 
recorded. But when the ears of opi 
• . . ■ _ • 

.-atus, on which 
Morse had expended many laborious months of en- 

. npleted his model near the end of the 



Samuel Jfinlc\> Brecse flDorse 397 

year 183s. Meantime in that year he was appointed 
professor of the literature of art in the New York Uni- 
versity. 

It was not until [837 that he exhibited his telegraph 
in operation. This was done by means of a 1700-foot 
wire stretched back and forth across a lecture-room. 
In that year also he first applied for a patent, and asked 
Congress for the money necessary to build his first 
line. The application for aid was unsuccessful, and in 
the following spring Morse went abroad to secure the 
support of foreign governments. He was received 
with high honors and scientific men applauded his 
discoveries. But his mission produced no results of 
value. 

On his return to New York in 1839 he found himself 
impoverished, penniless, and deeply in debt. During 
the next four years he found difficulty in providing 
himself even with the poorest food and the meanest 
of lodgings. Sometimes, indeed, he was in a state of 
actual starvation. Not until 1842 did he succeed in 
inducing Congress to grant him financial aid to the 
extent of $ 10,000. With Ezra Cornell for his partner, 
Morse made experiments with buried wires and finally 
built a line on poles from Baltimore to Washington. 
This line was opened in May, 1S44, and messages were 
sent and received over it to the measureless admiration 
of men. 

Morse offered his line and his system to the gov- 
ernment for $100,000, but the offer was declined. The 
victory had been won, however. The telegraph was a 



398 Gbc flnventors 

practical working fact, and the possessors of private 
capital were quick to see the boundless wealth it was 
capable of yielding to those who should invest their 
money in the extension of the system. 

There were difficulties still to be overcome, how- 
ever. Morse's patents were violated and their validity 
contested. It was not until prolonged, vexatious, and 
very expensive lawsuits had been carried to the 
Supreme Court of the United States and there finally 
decided in his favor, that those who had undertaken to 
establish lines throughout the land were able to gather 
any return from their investments, or even to rest 
securely in the possession of the lines they had con- 
structed. Then the patents were extended and tele- 
graphs spread nerves of intelligence all over the country. 

Morse's system was so greatly and so obviously 
better than Wheatstone's in Great Britain, and the 
modifications of Wheatstone's system which were 
experimented with on the Continent of Europe, that 
it soon replaced all others, and is now the only system 
in use anywhere on earth. 

Morse, in the meantime, was prosecuting experi- 
ments in submarine telegraphy. With a cable stretched 
under New York Harbor, he demonstrated the practica- 
bility of ocean cable service and laid the secure founda- 
tion for that vast system of undersea telegraphy which 
has since made the whole civilized world a closely re- 
lated neighborhood. 

Many other problems of invention engaged Morse's 
attention from time to time, but the results of his 



Samuel jfinlep Brecse flDorse 399 

labors upon them are so overshadowed by his achieve- 
ment in establishing the telegraph, that they are now 
remembered only by the few. 

A list of the honors showered upon him by univer- 
sities and learned societies and governments through- 
out Europe would fill pages. They are all recorded in 
the cyclopaedias, and need not be repeated here. 
They were, after all, only echoes of the greater fame 
that sounded in the applause of mankind for the father 
of the telegraph. Every pole upon which a wire is 
hung is to-day a reminder of the service this man ren- 
dered to mankind. Every click of an electric magnet 
sounds his praise. 

He died on the 2d of April, 1872, in the eighty- 
second year of his age. 




ELI WHITNEY 

ELI WHITNEY was a typical inventor. His habit 
of mind throughout life was to look straight at 
things and use common sense in dealing with 
them. All of his inventions were simple in the extreme, 
as all really valuable inventions must be. All of them 
were the simplest imaginable devices for the accom- 
plishment of the end aimed at with the least possible 
expenditure of force and the least loss of time. 

Whitney was bom in Massachusetts. December 8, 
176s. Mainly by self-teaching and personal ingenuity 
he made himself a skilled artisan at a time when 
skilled artisans were few and their appliances exceed- 
ingly meagre and clumsy. During the Revolutionary 
War, mere boy that he was, he rendered an inesti- 
mable service to the country by making nails by hand. 
Without his endeavors New England at that time 
must have gone without nails. 

Having accumulated a little money, Whitney ma- 
triculated at Yale College and took his degree there 
in 1792, at what was then the almost unprecedented 
age of twenty-seven, for at that time it was the cus- 



Eli Whitney 

I!. K|ng 



Eli Wbitnc\> 401 

torn for boys to enter college at about twelve or four- 
teen years of age and to be graduated at sixteen or 
eighteen. 

Whitney had not yet found his work, and until a 
man does that his career does not really begin. It was 
his plan, after his graduation, to devote himself to the 
work of teaching, for he seems to have had as yet no 
adequate conception of his own inventive genius. He 
therefore went to Georgia to accept the place of tutor 
in a planter's family. When he got there the place to 
which he aspired was filled, and Eli Whitney was " a 
man out of a job." 

He went, by invitation, to live in the family of the 
widow of General Nathanael Greene, while awaiting 
opportunity to secure a tutor's employment. In that 
lady's household, Whitney brought his mechanical in- 
genuity to bear in the construction of many little 
household conveniences of a mechanical character, 
which so pleased the lady that she vaunted his abilities 
abroad, telling everybody that "Whitney can make 
anything." 

There was just then a perplexing problem that not 
only confronted the Georgia planters but interested the 
entire civilized world. Linen was necessarily a costly 
product, as it is to-day and always will be. It was 
much more costly then, relatively, than it is now, be- 
cause, thanks to Whitney's ingenuity, cotton has since 
replaced ninety-nine one-hundredths of its uses. 

But cotton could not then do this. The difficulty of 
separating cotton from its seed, and thus rendering it 



402 a be Inventors 

available for the manufacturing of fabrics, was so great 
as to make cotton fabrics as expensive as those made 
of linen. One pound, or, at the most, two pounds, of 
lint cotton was all that a negro could separate from the 
seed in a day, and so the cultivation of cotton remained 
unprofitable. The problem was to find a better way, 
a way which would produce lint cotton so cheaply 
that every civilized man in the world might wear a 
shirt, and every civilized woman might pile high in 
her "presses" the household store of sheets and 
pillow-cases, while clothing herself in comely fashion 
in cotton gowns at one tenth the cost of woollen or 
linen fabrics. 

It was the widow of General Nathanael Greene 
who suggested that the planters should invoke Eli 
Whitney's aid in the solution of this problem. It was 
then that this gracious woman declared her conviction 
that Whitney "could make anything." 

Whitney instantly undertook the task. As yet he 
did not know the terms of the problem he was set to 
solve, for he had never seen seed cotton. He procured 
some with difficulty, studied its structure, and set him- 
self at work on the construction of a machine that 
should enable a negro man to separate the seed from a 
thousand pounds or more of cotton in a single day 
without exercising any particular intelligence or skill. 

Having no tools and no source of supply from 
which to get any, Whitney had to go to a forge and 
manufacture with his own hands all the implements 
that he needed. Having no wire and no possibility of 



Eli Mbitnq? 403 

buying any, he had to create a wire-drawing plant and 
himself make the wire which he intended to use in 
the construction of his machines. 

Thus toilsomely and in the face of almost inconceiv- 
able difficulties, Eli Whitney constructed a cotton-gin 
that, with the superintendence of one ignorant negro, 
was capable of doing the work of a thousand negroes 
in the way in which they had worked before. 

His invention made cotton cheap, and its cultivation 
enormously profitable. It gave clothing to mankind 
in a lavish abundance never before dreamed of, and at 
a cost that the poorest could easily afford, while to 
this country it gave a staple product whose sale has 
poured incalculable wealth into the laps of the people. 
How greatly beneficent his invention was, a few figures 
will show. The largest export of cotton in any one year 
before the invention of the cotton-gin was less than 
one hundred and ninety thousand pounds. By the year 
iSo"> the export had increased to more than forty-one 
million pounds. Since then the country has produced 
cotton crops amounting to more than eleven million 
bales, or five and a half billion pounds in a single year. 

All the wealth represented by these stupendous 
figures was in effect Eli Whitney's gift to his country 
and to mankind. But incidentally his invention gave 
a new lease of life to African slavery in America. It 
made slave labor enormously profitable where before 
it had been of very doubtful profit indeed. It created 
a" vested interest" in opposition to the influence of 
Jefferson and other such men who earnestly sought 



404 Cbe Inventors 

the gradual but certain extinction of slavery in the 
South. For this result, of course. Eli Whitney was no 
more responsible than was the inventor of wire nails 
for the loss of employment by thousands of cut-nail 
makers who were reduced to idleness and poverty by 
that device. 

In common with many other inventors who have 
conferred great benefits upon mankind. Eli Whitney 
got practically nothing out of this, his greatest, inven- 
tion. Before he could take out a patent on his cotton- 
gin his workshop was broken open and his machine 
stolen. It was so simple in its fundamental idea that 
any mechanic could duplicate it. and so presently cot- 
ton-gins, closely resembling it. and some of them being 
improvements upon it. were put upon the market to 
his destruction. He asked redress of the law. but to 
little effect. The lawyers accepted his retaining fees. 
but accomplished next to nothing in the matter of pro- 
tecting his rights. At one time, it is said, he had no 
less than sixty lawsuits pending against those who 
had stolen his invention, but it is not recorded that he 
got out of them enough to pay his attorneys. 

The State of South Carolina did indeed vote him an 
award of fifty thousand dollars for his invention, but 
he had to spend most of the money in litigation before 
he got it. "North Carolina granted him a royalty on 
the use of his machines, but very little ever came to 
him from that grant. Tennessee, by legislative act, 
promised him a like reward, but at a later session of 
the Legislature of that State the act was annulled. 



j£li TKQbitnc? 405 

Thus from an invention which gave cheap clothing 
to all mankind the earth over, and gave to the country 
many thousands of millions of dollars in productive 
capacity, the inventor got practically no return what- 
ever. 

One thing, however, it gave him. It taught him to 
appreciate his own abilities and to turn them to account. 
It turned his mind from that small and meagrely com- 
pensated career as a tutor, which he had before con- 
templated, to the more active and intelligent use of 
his rare mechanical gifts. He went back to New Eng- 
land and established a manufactory of arms, in which 
he, first of all men, introduced the system of a division 
of labor for the sake of greater precision and a more 
perfect result. He made many improvements in the 
arms themselves, also, and upon his models all the 
government arsenals and private factories of arms have 
ever since been conducted. 

In this work he earned a competence, and in spite 
of his loss of recompense for his greatest invention — 
the cotton-gin — he became a man of abundant fortune 
and died a distinguished personage in "New Haven, 
Connecticut, on the 8th of January, 182s, just after 
passing his sixtieth birthday. 

His service to the world is not rightly to be meas- 
ured by the wealth — enormous as it is — that his cot- 
ton-gin has enabled the cotton-growing regions of earth 
to produce. Incidentally his invention also made pos- 
sible all that vast cotton-spinning and cotton-weaving 
industry from which families by hundreds of thousands 



406 



Sbe inventors 



in Europe and America derive their means of liveli- 
hood. And still more important, perhaps, is the fact 
that the cotton-gin has given cheap clothing to all 
classes and conditions of men. women, and children 
throughout the world. 

The distinguished jury of the Mew York University 
has judged wisely in according to Eli Whitney a place 
among the immortal benefactors of mankind. 



^l--?2t.' 




THE ARTISTS AND NATURALISTS 



GILBERT CHARLES STUART 

GILBERT STUART alone of American painters 
has been admitted to the Hall of Fame in his 
capacity as artist. Audubon, Robert Fulton, 
and Morse were also painters, but their fame rests upon 
quite other than artistic achievements. Strangely 
enough, Benjamin West has been excluded from the 
honor. 

But whether or not Stuart was the greatest of Amer- 
ican painters, he was at any rate and very certainly the 
greatest of American portrait artists, and one of the 
greatest portrait-painters of any time or country. 

His genius for catching and fixing the expression of 
the human countenance was manifested even in his 
earliest youth, as two portraits, still preserved in the 
Redwood Library at Newport, attest. These and 
some other pictures were painted while Stuart was 
yet a boy, and before he had any instruction what- 
ever in his art, or even any opportunity to see pictures 
that were worth his while. 

Stuart was born in Narragansett, Rhode Island, on 
December 3, 1755. As has been said, he began painting 
409 



4'o Gbe artists an& IHaturalists 

while a mere child, and at the age of fifteen, when he 
received his first instruction in that art, he had already 
won some distinction for his ability to reproduce ex- 
pression as well as form in a portrait. 

His first tutor was Cosmo Alexander, who took the 
boy at the age of seventeen to Scotland for instruction. 
Alexander's death and that of the only other friend 
that Stuart had made in England left him so destitute 
that he was forced to work his way back to America 
as a landsman sailor on board a collier. 

His instruction was still, of course, exceedingly 
scant, and his youth was necessarily against him in 
the effort that he now made to establish himself as a 
portrait-painter in Newport, yet from the very begin- 
ning he seems to have commended himself by his work. 

His desire for further instruction induced him, in 
177s, to close his studio and go again to England. 
His hope was to study there under Benjamin West, 
as it was the ambition of every young American art 
student at that time to do. But the youth was 
modest even to extreme shyness, and it was not 
until three years later that he summoned the courage 
necessary to make application for admission to West's 
studio and for tuition at his hands. 

His gifts, however, quickly appealed to that master, 
and a little later, at West's suggestion, Stuart opened a 
studio of his own in London. There he almost in- 
stantly achieved a most notable success. During the 
next few years he was indeed the most famous portrait- 
painter then living in London. 



Gilbert Charles Stuart 

From a miniature liy -^arah (Goodrich 



Gilbert Cbarles Stuart 

When he returned to America, in 17Q: 
behind him in England and in Ireland some of the 
noblest works of his life. 

This success was quickly repeated in the United 
States, and after a little time he was able to realize 
the ambition of his life in painting a portrait of Wash- 
ington. There is some doubt whether that first por- 
trait of Washington remains or was destroyed by 
Stuart himself. It is pretty well established, however, 
that he made several replicas of it. He afterward 
painted many portraits of Washington, all of which 
are cherished as the best presentments of the Father 
of his Country which anywhere survive. 

Stuart's fame was now so great that his services 
were in constant demand, and his fees much higher 
than those of any other artist of his time. But so 
reckless was he of expenditure, and so careless and 
negligent of his affairs, that he was always in financial 
difficulties, and, when he died, on July 27, 1828, he 
left his family absolutely penniless. 

The qualities which distinguished Stuart's art were 
his wonderful mastery of color, his extraordinary fa- 
cility in reproducing evanescent expressions, making 
them contribute to his portraiture, and his masterful 
handling of flesh tints. 

He was never content to paint the face as it pre- 
sented itself to him in the pose. He diligently sought 
to catch it, as it were, unawares : to bring into play 
that which was most characteristic of his subject, and to 
put upon his canvas those expressions of countenance 



4" Cbc Rrrirt? and naturalists 

which meant so much more than mere form and 
feature. He was aided in this, it is said, by his re- 
markable conversational powers. He was an irres 
ible story-teller, and it was his habit during a sitting to 
indulge this faculty to the full, managing thus to inter- 
est his subject and to surprise in him those character- 
visions which were best interpretative of his 
character. 

Stuart left behind him at his death nearly a thousand 
portraits, more than seven hundred and fifty of which 
were catalogued in a single exhibition in Boston in the 
year 1SS0. These included, in addition to his other 
subjects, practically all the great Americans of his 
time, a fact which would give value to his work even 
if it had been artistically less notable than it was. 

Gilbert Stuart was. indeed, the portrait-painter of 
American celebrity, the limner of the countenances 
of those who chiefly contributed to make our country 
great. 



u{^ 










JOHN JAMES AUDUBON 

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON was a man of one idea, 
an enthusiast and devotee to his single chosen 
subject of fascinated study. 

His devotion to that study was strangely unselfish 
and even self-sacrificing. To it he gave time, toil, the 
endurance of hardship, and an utter disregard of per- 
sonal well-being throughout long years. 

In all this, he seems to have had no idea whatever 
of gain, or even of reputation. It was not, indeed, 
until he was a man of middle age that he seems ever 
to have thought of turning to any practical account the 
results of his long years of diligent endeavor. 

He was the son of a French naval officer, and was 
born in Louisiana, May 4, 1780. His father thought to 
train him for a career similar to his own as an officer 
in the French navy, but the boy from his earliest 
childhood manifested a passion for natural history 
which was not only absorbing but strangely exclusive 
of interest in anything else. 

As a mere child he was a student of animals and 
birds, but more particularly of birds. It was his habit 



4'4 Che artiste and naturalists 

to make drawings of them and to color these, when he 
could, as faithfully as his untrained eye and hand 
would permit. In view of his later eminence in this 
department, it seems a special pity that he was mod- 
est while a boy. and burned those juvenile efforts, 
which, had they been preserved, would have had 
an interest peculiar to themselves, and quite in- 
estimable. 

The making of these pictures began soon after his 
early infancy was past. The passion that inspired 
them seems to have been born with the boy. It was 
observed by his parents while he was yet in pinafores. 

It was impossible to educate such a boy in any but 
the one direction of his own choice, and his father, 
wisely realizing this, sought to make a painter of him. 
To that end he placed him as a student with David, 
who was then foremost among painters, and especially 
notable for his capacity to instruct young pupils, par- 
ticularly in the art of drawing. 

But young Audubon took little interest in the work 
assigned him in the studio. Following his instincts, 
instead, he spent the time he should have given to 
the study of perspective in wandering through the 
woods and fields, and making more and more intimate 
acquaintance with his friends, the birds. These he 
portrayed in preference to the subjects that David set 
for him to study. 

When young Audubon was seventeen years of age, 
his father abandoned all effort to give him a regular 
education, even in art. and sent him to live the wild 



John James Audubon 









J 



3obn 3amcs Huonbcn 415 

life that he preferred, on a farm which he owned near 
Philadelphia. Here began that wonderful collection 
of birds and eggs which made Audubon's name famous 
in after years. Here, too, began in earnest his work 
of painting portraits of his specimens, though to him 
it did not present itself as work, or impress him in any 
sense as a matter of serious endeavor. He pictured 
his birds with fidelity because he loved them, taking 
no thought whatever for any use that might be made 
of his pictures. 

He was comfortably well off in the goods of this 
world, and, while still a very young man, ventured to 
fall in love with the woman who afterwards became 
not only his wife but the lifelong companion of his 
wanderings, the sympathetic sharer of his thoughts 
and aspirations. 

At the suggestion of the young woman's father, 
Audubon attempted a business career, but he so 
neglected affairs for his favorite pursuits as to make 
only a succession of failures out of it. In New York, 
in Louisville, Kentucky, in New Orleans, — everywhere, 
indeed, that he went — his career as a merchant resulted 
only in that failure which might have been predicted 
in the case of a man of his inclinations and his habits 
of life. Finally he abandoned all efforts of this kind 
and went to live on a little Kentucky farm, where he 
might spend the greater part of his time wandering 
through the woods and studying natural history. 

Little by little his collections became notable and 
his drawings of them multiplied, yet among his 



4i 6 £bc artists ant) IRaturalists 

neighbors he was deemed a half-crazy fellow, good for 
nothing except to tramp and shoot and idle away his 
time in making quite useless pictures. 

In 1820, misfortune having overtaken him anew, 
he went to Louisiana, where his wife opened a school 
in which he taught music and dancing— music being 
the only art, apart from his bird portraiture, in which 
he was proficient. 

At this time, also, Audubon painted portraits and 
such other pictures as he could manage to sell for 
small sums. It was about 1824 that the thought was 
first suggested to him of turning to account the ac- 
cumulations of his woodland work, by giving his 
drawings in some shape to the public. Failing in his 
endeavors to accomplish this in Philadelphia, he went 
to England in 1820, where he became acquainted with 
many of the most distinguished men of the time, in- 
cluding Christopher North, Sir Walter Scott, Cuvier, 
and Humboldt. He was encouraged by them in his 
project of bringing out his drawings in the form of 
colored plates. 

The enterprise must necessarily be a very expensive 
one, and Audubon had no money whatever with 
which to undertake it. He set to work to earn the 
necessary capital by painting such pictures as he could 
get to do, and with the proceeds of this industry for 
capital he presently began the issue of that wonder- 
ful work, The Birds of North America. It consisted 
entirely of plates, five to a number, and the subscrip- 
tion price for the entire work was not less than a 



3obn 3amcs Hucntlxm 417 

thousand dollars. Audubon, meantime, was his own 
chief canvasser for subscriptions, a work in which 
his wife diligently assisted him. He also painted 
from time to time in order to support himself, and 
at last had the gratification of finishing, in 1839, the 
publication of the work which had been begun in 1830. 

Having thus brought out the volumes containing 
the plates, he set to work upon the letter-press volumes 
which were to accompany, illustrate, and explain them. 
This work occupied him for several years and was 
finished in 1844. Afterwards he wrote and published 
a small edition of The Birds of North America, and 
when that was done his work in the world was in 
effect ended. 

He had in the meantime been recognized as one of 
themselves by the greatest naturalists then living, and 
by the greatest artists as a fellow-worker, peculiarly 
gifted in his own department of artistic endeavor. 
Honors were showered upon him by learned societies 
in Europe and America, and the man who had for so 
many years tramped through the woods in homespun 
garb, " idling away his time," as his neighbors thought, 
died, one of the most famous of men, on January 27, 
1851. 




ASA GRAY 

NEXT to Dr. John Torrey— whose pupil and life- 
long' co-worker he was — Professor Asa Gray 
was the most learned of American botanists, 
and the one who contributed most, not only to the 
ordering of American plant study and its interpreta- 
tion, but to the advancement of botanical science gen- 
erally. In co-operation with Torrey, he was one 
o\ the influential leaders in those endeavors which 
brought about the natural classification of plants by 
their kinships, as a substitute for the arbitrary classifi- 
cation of Linnaeus. This was a service to botany 
scarcely less important than was the work, in another 
department of science, of those chemists who devised 
and secured the acceptance of the new. orderly, and 
rational nomenclature o\ chemistry by which the very- 
name given to an element or to a compound reveals at 
once its nature and its scientific place. 

Dr. Gray had also another claim to distinction 
among botanists. He knew, as Agassiz and Darwin 
and Huxley did. how to make science both intelligent 
and interesting to comparatively untrained minds, and 



Asa Gra\ 



tlie ltu^t by St. 






N 




















































ASA-WAT- 



■iBB^ 



Hsa (5 rap 4' 9 

how thus to make its teachings acceptable, instructive, 
and greatly enlightening to multitudes to whom the 
ordinary formulas of science were a mystery past un- 
derstanding. Probably there never were two little 
books that set so many people to thinking and observ- 
ing as Asa Gray's How PLinls Crow ami How Plants 
Behave. The very title of the last-named work is an 
inspiration to profitable study through observation,— 
the only form of study that science recognizes as worth 
the effort put into it. The simple suggestion that 
plants "behave,"— that they have ways ol their own, 
that they seem to be inspired with a purpose, whether 
their own or that of some power outside of themselves 
matters not,— that simple suggestion is an inspiration to 
scientific observation, a lure to interested looking, a 
temptation to earnest and profitable thought, and the 
simple lucidity of the essay both stimulated study and 
rewarded it. When the little book appeared in print, 
Dr. George Thurber, himself one of the notable botan- 
ists of his time, asked Professor Gray : " How did you 
happen to think of it ? " Dr. Gray replied : " It 's all 
due to that wonder-worker, Darwin. He has taught all 
of us how to observe, and that is the greatest lesson that 
anybody ever taught in this dull-eyed world of ours." 

Gray himself had much of Darwin's gifts of obser- 
vation and of inspiration. To a pupil who was worthy 
of his instruction he once said : " Look. Then think. 
Then look again in the light of your thinking. After that 
you will be tit to think in the light of your looking." 

All this was the genius of the born teacher; but it 



420 £be artists ano IRaturalists 

was more. That which he taught to his pupils as 
the art of acquisition in science was his own art of 
original, scientific discovery. To that temper of his 
mind, to that direction of his intellect, we owe all that 
he found out and recorded for our instruction. 

Asa Gray was born in the little village of Paris, 
Oneida County, New York, on November 18, 1810. 
The village had aspirations of greatness, as the name 
it selected for itself abundantly attests. If it has never 
achieved its ambitions in any other way, it is at any rate 
entitled to pride itself upon the fact that one of its 
mothers gave Asa Gray to a world that is always 
eagerly waiting for such men as he was. He had 
only an " academy " education, after which he studied 
so much of medicine as was in that day required for a 
degree that meant nothing in particular. In the course 
of his medical studies he learned at least what science 
means, and developed a passion for inquiry which 
made his subsequent career possible. 

He turned almost immediately from the pill practice 
of those days to the study of botany, under the tuition 
of the greatest botanist this country has ever pro- 
duced — Dr. John Torrey, an Immortal who has been 
strangely omitted in the choice of names for inscrip- 
tion in the Hall of Fame. He learned rapidly, and in 
1834 was recognized by the National Government as 
a botanist of authority, being appointed in that year to 
the place of botanist to the Wilkes expedition. Delay 
in the departure of that expedition led to his resigna- 
tion of the post assigned him. 



Bea <5rap 421 

The University of Michigan offered him a professor- 
ship, which he declined. In 1842 he was made a 
Professor of Natural History at Harvard, a position 
which he retained for more than thirty years, resign i un- 
it at last in 1871 because of advancing age ; but, by 
request of the University, retaining the curatorship of 
that wonderful herbarium, numbering more than 200,- 
000 specimens, and that library of more than 2200 
authoritative botanical works which he had collected 
during a lifetime of devotion to the subject of his 
special study, and had presented to the University as 
his material contribution to a science to which his en- 
tire life and all of his intellectual gifts had been a less 
material but immeasurably more important gift. 

In the practical work of American botanical ex- 
ploration only two men had been recognized by the 
United States Government as master minds in that 
department of scientific research— John Torrey and Asa 
Gray. To them were submitted all the wonderful col- 
lections made by the various expeditions sent out by 
the government, and to their labors we owe all that 
we possess of interpretative botanical literature. 

Earlier in life, Gray had undertaken, in collaboration 
with Torrey, to prepare a great, comprehensive, and 
authoritative work on The Flora of North America. 
Publishing, after the fashion of that time, in successive 
numbers, they covered those plants which are classed 
as " composite," but during the progress of the work 
the materials were so enormously increased by investi- 
gation, that even to complete this part of the work 



422 £be artists anfc IRaturaltsts 

would have required an appendix greater in extent 
than the work itself. To the lasting regret of all stu- 
dents, the enterprise was therefore abandoned. 

Asa Gray's writings on the specialties of his 
scientific study were mainly presented in the form 
of official reports and scientific monographs. He 
wrote several popular books of fascinating interest, the 
most popular of which have been mentioned already. 
But it is a matter of enduring regret that he found no 
time in which to interpret his more strictly scientific 
writings into a form in which they might inspire and 
enlighten men and women and children who have the 
scientific thirst for exact knowledge, but lack that 
technical instruction in science which is necessary to 
the full appreciation of formally scientific papers. 

Professor Gray continued to live at Cambridge until 
January 30, 1888, when his long and most useful life 
came to an end. 




INDEX 



Adams, John, essay on, 4; ; character, cour- 
age and learning, 43; early appreciation 
of inevitable independence, 43, 44 ; 
his diplomatic methods, 44 ; his love of 
truth, 44 ; his patriotic self-denial, 44 ; 
birth and education, 44; attitude toward 
religion, 4s ; early and lasting interest 
in public affairs, 45 ; advocate of western 
extension of country, 4s ft st-q. ; his fore- 
cast of the country's greatness, 45 ; his 
angry and insistent patriotism, 40-48 ; 
his opposition to stamp act and writs of 
assistance, 46; as a writer, 47; attempts 
to corrupt him, 47; in first colonial Con- 
gress, 48 ; early advocate of indepen- 
dence and antagonist of at compromise, 
48 ; moves Washington's appointment 
as commander-in-chief, 49; value of that 
service, 49, so ; secures passage of an 
act recommending independent colonial 
governments, so, si ; writes a declara- 
tion of independence into the preamble, 
5 1 ; leads debate in advocacy of decla- 
ration of independence, s 1 ; chairman 
board of war and ordnance, S2 ; op- 
poses reconciliation in every form, 52 ; 
his mission to France, 53 ; his shrewd 
penetration of French purposes, 53 ; re- 
called, 54 ; his return to Paris, 54 ; his 
distrust of Vergennes, 54 ; he defeats 
project to confine United States to re- 
gion east of Alleghanies, ss ; minister 



to Holland, S3 ; negotiates loan and 
treaty of commerce, 56; in Paris again 
to negotiate treaty of peace and inde- 
pendence, so; magnitude of his service, 
S7 ; thanked by Congress, 59 ; ambi- 
tion to be first President, 00 ; his over- 
weening self-conceit, 60; his impatience 
with the country's choice of Washing- 
ton, 60; opposed to Jefferson's doctrines, 
00 ; his belief in an aristocratic ruling 
class, 61 ; his distrust of universal suf- 
frage, 61 ; his discourses on Davila, 01 ; 
opposes pure democracy, 6i ; elected 
President, 01 ; unpopularity, 01, 62; 
ignores Jefferson, 62 ; has controversy 
with Hamilton, 62 ; perplexities of his 
administration, 02, 6s ; discredited and 
beaten at the end of it, 64; his appoint- 
ment of Marshall to be chief justice, 04 ; 
his puerile resentment of defeat, 64 ; his 
petulant retirement from office, 64 ; re- 
sumes his friendship with Jefferson, os ; 
his death and last words, 05; on Web- 
ster's eloquence, 99 

Adams, John Quincy, vile charges against, 
140 

Arnold, Benedict, Washington's attitude 
to, 11 

Audubon, John James, essay on, 411 ; his 
devotion to his one subject, 41 5 ; birth, 
41-,; his child-drawings of animals, 414; 
student under David, but abandoned 



4=4 



Inbey 



Audubon — Continued. 

studio for woods and fields, 414; art 
education abandoned, 41^; sent to a 
farm, 41? : begins his wonderful bird 
collection and his serious paint- 
ing of birds, 41; ; fortunately sympa- 
thetic marriage, 4 1 ; : repeatedly attempts 
a business career and fails, 415; goes to 
Kentucky farm and lives in the woods, 
415; deemed a half-crazy good-for- 
naught, 41s; goes to Louisiana and 
teaches music and dancing. 410: goes 
to England to make market of his draw- 
ings and paintings, 410: encouraged by 
i!i. and Cuvier, 410: earning 
the necessary capital by painting, begins 
at last the issue of Birds of North 
Americj, 410 ; everywhere honored by 
naturalists and painters, 417; dies fa- 
mous, 417 

Bank. National, fight concerning, 1^4 et 

J;',/..- retaliates. 155 
Beecher. Henry Ward, essay on. 356 ; a 
commanding force as orator, i^o : 
ephemeral character of his work. 356 et 
seq.; his books neglected 
anal\-:-. 356 ei • . oratorical method. 
-.;-. 358 ; his illogical temperament, 
-,;S; an emotional thinker, 358, 
his intellectual method illustrated in 
an anecdote, 359 ; birth and education, 
360 : preacher in Indiana, 360; in Ply- 
mouth pulpit, 560 ; his earnestness of 
conviction. ;6o ; his oratorical artifices. 
501 ; histrionic skill. -01 : first of the 
"political preachers.'' 501 ; his own ac- 
count of himself, 562 ; his influence, liv- 
ing and dead, 502, ;o; : the Tilton 
scandal, ^o" : death, -o; 
Braddock, Washington as lieutenant of, 
. 18 ; Washington saves his army, 18 
Bryant, William Cullen, fails of election, 

Bryce's injustice to Jefferson, 66 
Byron on Washington. 4 
California, peopling of, reopens slavery 
question, 131 



Champ, Sergeant, Washington's dealing 
with. 1 1 

Channing. William Ellery, essay on, 351 
apostle of liberality, yet by instinct a 
conservative, ;;o ; comparison with 
Emerson. ;=;o ; character, 55 i ; his re- 
ligious temperament, ^^i, -^2 ; birth 
and education, ;=;2; tutor in Richmond, 
;;■; his asceticism, ;;■;: becomes clergy- 
man, 353 ; his Federal Street pastorate, 
353 ei seq.; his preaching and his 
writings, ;^4; the revolt of conscience, 
-^4, 355 ; death. 355 

Clay. Henry, essay on, 12^ ; his gift of 
leadership, 125 et seq.; his popularity, 
120 et seq.; his eloquence, 127; his in- 
consistency. 12-jetseq.; opposes slavery 
but serves it. 127./ seq.; opposes Na- 
tional Bank, but becomes its chief advo- 
cate. 127; his attitude toward slavery, 
127. 12S et seq. : his devotion to the 
Union a dominating force in his charac- 
ter and career, 1 20. 1 30 ; his tariff in- 
consistencies, 1-1. r,: et seq.; his 
meagTe education, 133 ; his superficial- 
ity, i",: advocates emancipation, 134; 
appointed Senator, 135; saves Ken- 
tucky from ridiculous blunder. 135; di ic- 
trine of home manufacture, 1 35 ; 
duellina. 1 -^ ; Senator again. 1 -,o ; his 
policy of limited protection. 1 36 ; op- 
poses U. S. Bank, 136; in 
-;o: speaker and leader. i~,7; cham- 
pions war with England, 1 ^7 : Madison 
wants to make him commander-in- 
chief. 1 37 : his popularity strangely 
survives disappointment, 1 37 ; peace 
commissioner. 1 ^S ; speaker again, 
i-,S: fir-t protective tariff. 1 ;S, 
1 ;o : Clay's self-deception, 1 39 tt 
seq.: his erratic bank course, 140 it 
seq.; internal improvements, 141 etseq.; 
secret of Clay's influence, 141. 14- *' 
seq. : no party divisions. 142 ; Missouri 
Compromise, 142 et seq. : returns to 
Congress and is again made speaker, 
14; : candidate for presidency. 14= ! 
president-maker, 140; the charge of 



Hn&cy 



425 



Clay — Continued. 

"bargain and corruption," 147, 140; 
accepts cabinet place at Adams's hands, 
148; fights duel with Randolph, 148; 
Jackson's hostility, 140; election of hos- 
tile Congress, 149 ; bitterest of all cam- 
paigns, 149 ; Clay's chagrin over 
Jackson's election, 130; Senator again, 
150; strengthens "tariff of abomina- 
tions," 150; nullification, 130; pacifica- 
tor, 150; reduces tariff, 150; his greatest 
blunder, 1 5 1 ; forces bank issue into 
campaign of 1832, and is beaten by his 
own masterly arguments, 151 et seq.; 
fight on National Bank, 1 =14 et st'i/. ; reso- 
lutions of censure, 15s; Jackson protests, 
iss ; renewal of slavery question, 1 so, 
1S7 ; Clay seeks compromise, 137; not 
a candidate for President in 1836 and 
1840, 158 ; Clay's bank bills and Tyler's 
vetoes, 160; Clay's anger, 160; bids 
farewell to Senate, 101 ; makes "pro- 
gresses " as candidate for presidency, 
101 ; candidate in 1S44, 102 et seq.; ar- 
ranges with Van Buren to exclude Texas 
issue, 163, 104; failure, 164; Clay's 
"hedging," 104; defeat, 165; his 
poverty, 163 ; relief, 10s ; presidunti.il 
fever still hot, 165 ; set aside for Tay- 
lor, 100 ; Clay's humiliation, 167 ; re- 
fuses to support candidate, 167; again 
advocates emancipation in Kentucky, 
107; Senator again, 107, 10S; the com- 
promise of 1850, 168 et seq.; death, 171 
Columbus, Christopher, validity of his 
claim to honor as discoverer of America, 

Cooper, James Fenimore, fails of election, 
xvi 

Cooper, Peter, essay on, 174 ; intelligent 
beneficence, 374 ; helping men to help 
themselves, 374 ; a typically American 
career, 37s ; birth and boyhood, 37s ; 
learns hatter's trade, 375 ; in other em- 
ployments, 37s; learns carriage making,, 
376 ; glue making, iron working, ma- 
chinery, etc., 376; makes first American 
locomotive, 376 ; a great captain of in- 



dustry, 377 ; aids Atlantic cable, 177 ; 
establishes Cooper Union, -,7s ; his 
Americanism and democracy, 378 

Criticism of selections made, xi et seq. 

Duel between Clay and Marshall, 1 35 ; 
between Clay and Randolph, 14S 

Edwards, Jonathan, essay on, 337 ; en- 
vironment, intellectual altitude, and 
limitations, 337 et seq.; the blight of a 
doctrine, 344 ; a logical but unreason- 
able age, 344 ; a great mind in hand- 
cuffs and spancels, 34s ; his uprightness 
and purity, 345 ; sacrifices to conscience, 
346; birth and precocity, ,40 ; at Yale, 
346 ; in New York pastorate, 346 ; tutor 
at Yale, 347 ; goes to Northampton, 
346 ; great trial of his life, 346 et seq.; 
refuses to compromise with wrong, 348; 
self-sacrificing honesty, 348 ; a genuine 
hero, 349 ; missionary, 349 ; president 
of Princeton College, 349 ; death, 349 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, essay on, 324 ; 
his genius and intellectual altitude, 124, 
325 et seq.; his transcendentalism, -,2s 
el seq. ; his refusal to defend his doc- 
trines, 326 et seq.; his pantheism, -,27 ; 
his cheerful inconsistency, 328 et seq. ; 
at all times a poet, 329 ; estimate, -,29 ; 
opposes organized reform, 310 ; his un- 
eventful life, 331 ; birth and education, 
331 ; abandons the pulpit, 332 ; writes 
English Traits, 332 ; affection in which 
he was held, 333 ; rebuilding of his 
burned house, 333 ; triumphal recep- 
tion, S33 ; intellectual decay and death, 
334 

Farragut, David Glasgow, essay on, 270 ; 
first American admiral, 270 ; last sur- 
vivor of old-school naval officers, 270 ; 
birth, 270; adopted into navy, 271 ; 
commands prize ship at twelve years of 
age, 271, 272 ; his first sea fight, 273 ; 
serves in Mediterranean, 273 ; lives at 
Tunis, 273; nicknamed "the young 
admiral," 274 ; Mexican War service, 

274 ; establishes Mare Island navy yard, 

275 ; Civil War and divided allegiance,. 



426 



In&cy 



Farragut— Continued. 

273 ; Farragut adheres to Union, 276 ; 
ordered to capture New Orleans, 270 ; 
peculiar insolence of the orders given 
him, 270 ; campaign against New Or- 
leans, 270 et seq.; his splendid "river 
fight," 270 ; captures New Orleans, 
280 ; forbidden to attack Mobile, 280 ; 
opens Mississippi, 281 ; ordered to assail 
Mobile, 2S1 ; the "Bay fight," 282; 
" Go on. Damn the torpedoes," 282 ; 
made rear admiral and afterwards ad- 
miral, 283 ; commands fleet to receive 
George Peabody's body, 383 ; death, 

Foreign politics, influence in American 
affairs, 02 

Franklin, Benjamin, essay on, 23 ; Apostle 
of Common Sense, 2 3 et seq .; anecdote 
of plagiarizing clergyman, 24 ; his mili- 
tary vagary, 20-24 \ h' s electrical ex- 
periments, 25 ; observations of Gulf 
Stream, 25 ; Poor Richard's Almanac 
and its sordidness, 20 ; his grandly self- 
sacrificing life, 26 ; his lack of sentiment, 
27 ; his treatment of Deborah Read, 27 
et seq.; his neglect of his wife, 28 ; 
why he married her, 20, 30 ; his service 
to Braddock, 31 ; the institutions he 
created, 31 ; his patriotism, 31 et 
passim : his meagre education and 
its lesson, 32 ; his old-age service, 
30, 40, 41 ; his conception of the 
Union, 3=; ; birth and circumstances, 36; 
omnivorous reader, 37 ; his linguistic 
attainments, 37 ; learning his trade, 
37 ; his early achievements as a forcible 
writer, 37, 38 et seq.; career in Phila- 
delphia, 38 ; first journey to London, 
37, 38 ; postmaster-general, 39; organ- 
izer of public sentiment, 30; his meth- 
ods, 30 ; his scientific work, 30, 40 ; 
his diplomatic career, 40, 41 ; president 
of Pennsylvania, 41 ; member of con- 
stitutional convention, 41 ; death, 41 ; 
summary, 42 

Fulton, Robert, essay on, 387 ; why he 
was chosen instead of Fitch, xiii, xiv ; 



parallel between his career and Morse's, 
387 ; birth, 387 ; a successful painter at 
seventeen, 387 ; pupil of Benjamin 
West, 388 ; becomes acquainted with 
the inventors, Earl Stanhope and Duke 
of Bridgewater, 388 ; becomes himself 
an inventor, 388 ; advocates New York 
canals, 388 ; paints first panorama in 
France, 389 ; first submarine boat, 380 ; 
succeeds in navigating Hudson, 380 ; 
his claim to be considered originator of 
steam navigation, 389 et seq.,; death, 
390 



Gallaudet, Dr., strange omission of, xvi 
Gates, Horatio, Washington's treatment 

of, 10 
Grant, Ulysses Simpson, essay on, 221 ; 
typical modern soldier, 221 ; personal 
characteristics, 221, 222 ; his control of 
imagination, 222 ; his sentiment illus- 
trated, 223 ; birth, 224 ; education, 224; 
service in Mexican War, 224 ; resigns, 
224 ; unsuccessful in business, 224 ; so- 
licits service at outbreak of Civil War 
unsuccessfully, and gets into the army 
through volunteers, 224 ; captures Pad- 
ucah, 22s; battle of Belmont, 22=;; plans 
campaign against Forts Henry and Don- 
elson, 22s ; Halleck rejects plan, 226 ; 
later Halleck consents, 226 ; Grant's 
success, 220 ; first decisive victories of 
Union armies, 227 ; major-general of 
volunteers, 227 ; again in disfavor with 
Halleck, 227; Shiloh or Pittsburg Land- 
ing, 227 ; Grant's daring strategy and 
its results, 22S ; Vicksburg campaign, 

230 et seq. ; major-general in regular 
army and in command of the West, 

231 ; achievements, 231 ; in command 
of all the armies, 232 ; decides to make 
the destruction of Lee's power his sole 
objective, 232 ; exposition of his strat- 
egy, 232 el seq.; errors of criticism, 
233<7s«/.; strategy of common sense, 
23=;; the final struggle, 237 et seq. ; 
end of the war, 230 ; controversy 
with President Johnson, 239 ; general 



"lln&cy 



427 



Grant — Continued. 

of the army, 210; his delicate posi- 
tion, 239 ; President, 240 ; his errors 
and Ins achievements in administration, 
240, 241 ; his service to sound money 
and the nation's financial integrity, 242 ; 
practical civil service reform, 24; ; his 
intense deprecation of war, 241 ; his 
international polity, 24-, ; his services to 
peace by arbitration, 24; ; his practice, 
244 ; his dealings with Spain, 244 ; his 
extraordinary services as President, 24s ; 
his tour around the world, 24s ; the 
honors everywhere heaped upon him, 
24^ ; the Grant & Ward calamity, 24s, 
24b ; last labors and death, 240 ; high 
qualities of character, 240 

Gray, Asa, his selection instead of Torrey, 
xi ; essay on, 418; co-operation with 
Torrey in reforming botanical classifica- 
tion, 418 ; his capacity in interpreting 
science, 41 S; How Plants Grow, and 
How Plants Behave, 419 ; Gray's esti- 
mate of Darwin, 410; his teaching 
method, 410 ; birth and education, 420; 
studies under Torrey, 420 ; government 
service, 420 ; professor at Harvard, 42 1 ; 
his writings, popular and official, 422 ; 
death, 422 

Gross, Dr., not nominated, xvi 

Hall of Fame — account of, x ; conditions 
of admission to, x, xi 

Harrison, W. H., his unfitness for Presi- 
dent, 158 ; his death, 159 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, essay on, 303 ; 
his genius, 303 ; birth, 303 ; love of 
solitude, 303 etseq.; literary style, 305 ; 
education, 306 ; meagre returns of his 
literary work, 307, 308 ; Tin- Scarlet 
Letter, -,oS, -,12; English appreciation, 
308 ; Twice Told Tales, 309 ; weigher 
in Boston Custom House, 309 ; Brook 
Farm experience, 310 et scq.; at Con- 
cord, 311; domestic happiness, 311; 
bread- winning problem, 31 1 ; magazine 
work, 311; second series of Twice Told 
Tales, 311 ; financial losses, 312 ; in 



Salem Custom House, 312 ; fame unex- 
pected, 313 ; restlessness, 313 ; removes 
to Berkshire Hills, 313; House of the 
Seven Gables, 313 ; The IVonder Hook, 
The Snow /mage, etc., 314 ; removes to 
Lenox, 114 ; The Blithedale Romance, 
314; returns to Concord, 314; consul 
at Liverpool, 314 ; life in Europe, 31s ; 
return to America and death, lis ; his 
character, ; 1 5, 316 

Henry, Joseph, his telegraphic inventions, 
xiv, -,02, 393 et scq. 

Hopkins, Mark, omitted, xvi 

Howe, Elias, his service to humanity, xiii 

Introductory, ix 

living, Washington, essay on, 2S7 ; his 
supremacy in American literature, 287 ; 
his varied achievements, 288 et seq.; 
his intellectual grasp and broad sympa- 
thies, 2S9 ; character of his mind, 289 ; 
robs his own orchard, 290 ; his affec- 
tion for trashy books, 290 ; Mr. George 
P. Putnam's anecdote, 290 ; his loyalty 
to New York City, 291, 202; birth, 
292 ; father and mother, 292 ; meagre 
and irregular education, 292 ; goes to 
Europe, 20-, ; Salmagundi, 293 ; his 
great sorrow, 293 et seq. ; Knicker- 
bocker's History, 204, :o, ; distaste for 
systematic work, 20s ; Walter Scott's 
effort to befriend him, 29s, 296 ; detesta- 
tion of law practice, 200 ; love of so- 
ciety, 200 ; goes again to England, 200; 
in business, 296 ; failure of his firm, 
297 ; the Sketch Book, 297 ; Brace- 
bridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, etc., 
achieve remarkable success, 297 ; goes 
to Madiid, 207 ; Life of Columbus, 
Granada, Alhambra, etc., wonderfully 
successful, 298 ; Secretary of Legation 
at London, 298 ; honored by Royal So- 
ciety and Oxford University, 20S ; re- 
turns to New York, 29Q ; buys Sonny- 
side and makes beautiful home life, 299 ; 
literary work, 300 ; Minister to Spain, 
300 ; Mahomet, 300 ; Mr. Putnam 
undertakes Irving's revival, 301 ; Life 



428 



"flnbey 



Irving — Continued. 
of Washington, 302 ; old age and 
death, 302 

Jackson, Andrew : Webster supports him 
against nullification', 114; Webster op- 
poses his bank policy, no; Jackson 
censures Congress for criticising him, 
and claims extraordinary powers, 1 16 et 
seq. ; his hostility to Clay, 149 ; elected 
President, 150; resolute attitude toward 
nullification, iso ; his war on national 
banks, 1^4 et seq.; protests against 
resolutions of censure, i^ 

Jefferson, Thomas, essay on, 66; domi- 
nant characteristic love of liberty, 06 ; 
Bryce's injustice to his memory, 66 ; 
his efforts to write human liberty into 
statute law, 07 ; attitude toward slavery, 
67, 68 et seq.; his first public speech in 
advocacy of emancipation, 08 ; his three 
measures for liberty, 00 et seq. ; his work 
for religious liberty, 70-72 ; his labors 
for local courts, common schools, and 
town government, 7-, ; keynote of his 
character, 7-5 ; his attitude toward 
French Revolution, 73, 74 ; stupid 
blunders concerning it, 73, 74 ; his self- 
sacrificing devotion to public service, 74, 
7=, ; his rule ot life, 7; ; how he im- 
poverished himself in national service, 
75, 76 ; education, 70, 77 et seq.; his 
literary style, 77, 78 ; unpaid public 
service, 78 ; member of Virginia House 
of Burgesses, 79 ; conflict with Lord 
Botetourt, 79 ; writes Virginia's 
" Draught of Instructions," the first 
declaration of independence, 79 ; his ad- 
dress to the King, 70, 80 ; chairman of 
committee to draught Declaration of 
Independence at thirty - three years 
of age, 80, 81 ; his question to the King 
and Parliament, 81 ; his special fitness 
to write the Declaration of Independence, 
81 ; his warfare upon primogeniture, en- 
tails, and church and state, 82 ; three 
times appointed Minister, 82 ; Governor 
of Virginia, 82, 83 ; again appointed 



Minister, 83 ; in Congress, 83 ; orig- 
inates decimal currency, 83 ; appoint- 
ed for fifth time Minister to France, 

83, 84 ; his study of French social con- 
ditions, 84, 85 ; his return to America, 

84, 8s ; Secretary of State under Wash- 
ington, 85 ; difficulties of the position, 
85-87 ; resigns, 87 ; Washington in- 
vites him to return to Cabinet, but he 
declines, 88 ; President from 1S01 to 
1809, 88 et seq. ; his educational service 
to the Republic, 88 ; the Louisiana Pur- 
chase and its significance, 88, 92 ; demo- 
cratic administration, 89 ; sweeps away 
all aristocratic forms and ceremonies, 89 ; 
abandons speech and substitutes message 
to Congress, 90 ; author of Kentucky 
resolutions of 1798, 90, 91 ; undoing of 
the Alien and Sedition Laws, 91 ; his civil 
service problems and record, 91, 92 ; 
Louisiana Purchase, 92 ; his service in 
republicanizing the Republic, 02,9;; his 
poverty at end of his public service, o;, 
04 ; his effort to establish common 
schools in Virginia, 94 ; father of the 
University of Virginia, 94, 95 ; sum- 
mary, 95 

Kent, James, essay on, 192 ; his learning, 
192 ; his commentaries, 10; ; birth, 
101 ; educated at Yale, 10; ; his extra- 
ordinary studiousness, 193 ; professor 
of law at Columbia, 194; Supreme 
Court justice, 194 ; his work for com- 
mercial law, 194; chancellor, 194; 
retirement, 194 ; death, 193 

Lee, Robert Edward, essay on, 247 ; crit- 
icism of his selection, xvii ; his charac- 
teristics, 247 ; offered command of 
Union armies, 247 ; his uncomplaining 
assumption of all responsibility, 247 et 
seq. ; his wish to employ negroes as 
soldiers baffled, 248 ; wrote no me- 
moirs, and bravely offered no excuse for 
failure, 248 ; high descent, 248, 249 ; 
alliances by marriage, 249 ; birth, 249 ; 
honor man at West Point, 249 ; engi- 



fli^ey 



429 



Lee — Continual. 

neering work, 249, 2,0 ; Scott's high 
tribute to, 2so ; in command of West 
Point, 250 ; reforms institution and en- 
larges curriculum, 2S0 ; at Harper's 
Ferry during John Brown's raid, 250 ; 
Civil War and Lee's ordeal, 2io ; his 
attitude, 250 ; his letter concerning it, 
2=, 1 ; Scott deeply laments his loss, 
252 ; Lee goes to Richmond and un- 
dertakes organization of Virginia's force, 
252 ; appointed full general :;: ; plans 
campaign, 2s2 ; goes to West Virginia, 
2s*; sent to South Carolina for coast 
defence, 253 ; made Commander-in- 
chief, 2,4; McClellan's advance on 
Richmond, 204 ; Lee's strategy, 2S4 ; 
compels McDowell to retire, 25s ; Lee 
in personal command, 2so ; seven 
days' fight, 2^7 el seq. ; dislodges Mc- 
Clellan, 257 ; Lee manoeuvres to com- 
pel McClellan's retirement, 2=57 et seq. ; 
meets and overcomes Pope, 259 ; re- 
sults of his strategy, 2^0 ; invades 
Maryland, 2<;o et seq. ; Antietam, 200 ; 
summary of results, 200 ; confronts 
Burnside at Fredericksburg, 201 ; great 
battle there, 201 ; Lee's hesitancy, 202 ; 
confronts Hooker, 202 ; Chancellorsville 
campaign, 202 et seq.; Lee again crosses 
Potomac, 204 ; Gettysburg campaign, 
264 et seq. ; retreats 265 ; results, 26s ; 
confronted by Grant (q. v.) campaign 
of, 1864, 206 et seq. ; compelled to 
hold Richmond against his own judg- 
ment, 267, 268 ; surrender, 208 ; con- 
duct in adversity, 268, 200 ; college 
work, 208 ; death, 208 ; greatness, 200 

Lincoln, Abraham, essay on, ioq ; extra- 
ordinary contrast between birth and 
achievements, 109 et seq. ; his lack of 
education, 200 ; his literary style, 201 ; 
slow to develop, 201, 202; hereditary 
indolence and content, 202 ; birth, 203 ; 
Black Hawk War, 201 ; country store 
keeper, 203 ; studies law, 201, 204 ; 
member of Legislature, 204 ; member 
of Congress, 204 ; his " touch " with 



" the plain people," 20, ; his melan- 
choly and his humor, 20=; ; his love 
affairs, 20s ; suicidal impulse, 200 ; 
Missouri Compromise, 207 ; Kansas- 
Nebraska bill, 207 ; campaign against 
Douglas, 208-210; elected President, 
210; perplexities, 211, 212; Seward's 
assumption, 212 ; attitude toward radi- 
cal abolitionists, 21 ■* ; his resolute inde- 
pendence, 214; his steadfast policy of 
saving the Union, 21=; el seq. ; Virginia's 
attitude, 216; Virginia's secession pre- 
cipitates war, 217 ; his perplexities and 
travail of soul, 218 ; his patient endu- 
rance, 218 et seq. ; assassination, 210 ; 
South's resentment of the crime, 210 

Lodge, Henry Cabot, comment on Web- 
ster's disloyalty, 106 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, essay on, 
317; birth, 317 ; education, 317 ; pro- 
fessorship, 317; death, 317; uneventful 
life, 318; estimate of his poetry, 318 et 
seq. ; his lack of passion and other lim- 
itations, 118, 310; his English hexa- 
meters, 321 et seq.; the Hiawatha 
metre, 322 

Louisiana Purchase, far-reaching import- 
ance of, 92 

Mann, Horace, essay on, 180 ; had only 
67 votes, xvii ; the revolution he 
wrought in educational conception and 
methods, 380 et seq. ; birth and educa- 
tion, 4S2; work of education begins, 382 
et seq. ; results of his eleven years' de- 
votion, 383 ; his extraordinary industry, 
384 ; service in Congress, 384 ; presi- 
dent of Antioch College, 384 ; death, 
384 ; his legacy of beneficence to the 
nation, 384 
Marshall, Humphrey, duel with Clay, 1 35 
Marshall, John, essay on, 17s ; Adams's 
appointment of him, 04 ; Chief Justice 
for more than third of century, 17s et 
seq. ; his extraordinary formative influ- 
ence, 17s et seq. ; independence of 
Supreme Court, 170; Marbury vs. Madi- 
son, 170; birth, 177; education, 177; 



430 



InDej 



Marshall — Continued. 
soldier, 178; his extraordinary lucid- 
ity of statement, 1 78 ; secures Vir- 
ginia's acceptance of Constitution, 179 ; 
by instinct a Federalist, 180; three 
times rejects office, 181 ; Minister to 
France, 1S1 ; " Millions for defence but 
not one cent for tribute," 181 ; John 
Adams's commendation, 182; Marshall 
declines Supreme Court judgeship, 182 ; 
member of Congress, 182 ; happy acci- 
dent made him Chief Justice, 183 etseq.; 
manner of his appointment, 184 ; his 
fame and his enduring monument, 1S4 ; 
death, 184 

McClellan's advance on Richmond, 2^4 

Missouri Compromise, 145, 207 

Morse, Samuel Finley Breese, essay on, 
:sm of his selection overjoseph 
Henrv, -02 ; elements of controversy, 
slated. -,02 et seq. : Morse's versatility, 
-o^; ; achievements in art and science, 
■;q-;, -04 ; birth and education, 394 ; 
boy painter, ;o4 ; studies under Wash- 
ington Allston, and Benjamin West, 
504 ; wins high honors in England, 
-,04 ; returns to America and achieves 
remarkable success as portrait painter, 
394; conspicuous works, 395 . opens 
studio in New York, 395 ; founder of 
National Academy, 395 ; his fame, 395 1 
returns to Paris, iq^ ; attention drawn to 
telegraphy on return voyage, 395 ; his 
work and Henrys. 395, 306; invents 
dot-and-dash alphabet, 390; exhibits first 
telegraph in operation, 307 : unsuccess- 
fully appeals to Congress for subsidy, 
307 : goes to Europe for financial sup- 
port but returns penniless. 397 : se- 
cures aid of Congress, ;97 : establishes 
first public telegraph from Washington 
to Baltimore, ^07 ; private financiers 
support him and after long litigation the 
Morse electro-magnetic telegraph is ex- 
tended over entire country, 598 ; experi- 
ments in submarine telegraphy and 
other problems of invention, 30S ; 
deat!' 



Motley, John Lothrop, fails of election, 

xvi 
Murray, Lindley, omitted, xvi 

New England's interest in the slave trade, 
antagonism to Story for en- 
forcing law, 180, 100 

Nullification, Webster's support of Jack- 
son, 114; Clay's compromise, 114; 
attempted, 1 =;o et seq. 

Parties, first formation of, 180 

Payne, John Howard, fails of election, xxi 

Peabody, George, essay on. -,07 ; Glad- 
stone's tribute, ^07 ; his extraordinary 
beneficence, -,07 et seq. : business 
methods in philanthropy. 368 ; bi th 
and education, ■joo ; business success, 
-,00 : establishes himself in London, 
369 ; his confidence in United States 
securities during Civil War, 370 ; his 
principal benefactions. 370 et seq. : his 
London tenement houses, 371; CongTess 
thanks him, 372 ; Queen of England 
lavishes honor upon him, ^72 ; other 
benefactions, 372, 373 ; public statue 
erected to him in London, 373; extraor- 
dinary honors from two nations. -,7- 

Pennsylvania presses relief upon Wash- 
ington, which he refuses, o 

Physicians and surgeons, their strange 
omission from the list, xvi 

Poe. Edgar Allan, fails of election, xvi 

Purpose of this work, ix 

Putnam, George P., his friend, anecdote 
of Irving, 200 ; his service to Irving and 
to literature, 501 ; revives Irving's pop- 
ularity. ^01 

Randolph. John, duel with Clay, 148 
Rush, Benjamin, xvi 

Scott, Sir Walter, friendship for Irving, 

20^, 200 
Scott. Winfield, Webster refuses to sup- 
Seven Pines, battle of. 2;; 
Slavery question, Webster's attitude, 121; 



Ilnfccy 



431 



Slavery question— Continued. 

approves Clay's compromise measures, 
122 ; Clay's inconsistent attitude, 127, 
\2%et seq. ; Missouri Compromise, 143; 
question conies up again, 1^7 

Story, Joseph, essay on, 180 ; genius and 
character, 186, 187 ; birth and educa- 
tion, 187 ; literary work, 188 ; a mod- 
erate adherent of Jefferson, 188 ; 
appointed to Supreme Court bench at 
age of thirty-two, 1 88 ; attitude toward 
African slave trade, 18a ; vituperated 
for trying to enforce plain letter of the 
law, 189 ; professor at Harvard, 101 ; 
death, lot ; his account of college edu- 
cation in his time, 3S"? 

Stuart, Gilbert Charles, essay on, 400 ; 
preferred to West and others, xii ; su- 
premacy as portrait painter, 400 ; genius 
manifested in boyish paintings still ex- 
tant, 409 ; birth, 409 ; goes to England 
with Cosmo Alexander, 410; in utter 
destitution works his way back on 
board a collier, 410; succeeds as painter 
in Newport, 410 ; goes to Europe and 
studies under Benjamin West, 410 ; 
becomes most famous portrait painter in 
London, 410 ; repeats success in Amer- 
ica, 411 ; his Washingtons, 41 1 ; enor- 
mous activity and earning, 411 ; yet 
lives in debt and dies penniless, 41 1 ; 
qualities of his art, 411 ; his methods, 
411; nearly a thousand of his works 
survive, 412 

Surgeons and physicians, their strange 
omission, xvi 

Tariff of abominations, 149 

Taylor, Zachary, takes nomination from 
Clay and Webster, 1 20 

Texas, annexation of, opens slavery ques- 
tion, 120 

Thoreau, Henry, fails of election, xvi 

Virginia, presses rewards upon Washing- 
ton, which he diverts to education, 7 ; 
opposes secession as a policy while 
holding to be a right, 210; secedes, 2 1 7 



Washington, George, essay on, ; ; suprem- 
acy of his fame, 3 ; its enduring charac- 
ter, 4 ; keynote of his greatness, 4 ; his 
devotion to duty, 5 ; his refusal of all 
emoluments as commander and as Pres- 
ident, s, o ; States press rewards upon 
him and he refuses, 6, 7; Pennsylvania's 
proposal of aid declined, 7 ; his plan of 
hospitality, 7 ; Virginia's offer of canal 
shares, 7 ; he devotes them to educa- 
tion in national spirit, 8 ; president of 
constitutional convention, 8 ; President 
of United States, 8, 9 ; asks Congress 
to make no provision for his salary, 9 ; 
his wonderful character, 0, to, 12; an- 
alysis of his character, to, 11 et seq. ; 
illustrations of character, to, 11 ,7 seq ; 
his treatment of Horatio Gates, 10 ; atti- 
tude toward Arnold, 11 ; birth, family, 
wealth, and aristocratic lineage, 1 3 et 
seq. ; education meagre, 10 ; surveyor 
while yet a boy, 10; adjutant-general 
at eighteen, 17; mission to Ohio coun- 
try, 17; commander-in-chief of Vir- 
ginia's forces at age of twenty-one, 18 ; 
Braddock's lieutenant, 18; saves army, 
18 ; captures Fort Du Quesne, to ; 
elected to House of Burgesses, to ; his 
extraordinary reception, 20 ; com- 
mander-in-chief in Revolution, 20; 
President, 21 ; greatest of men in all 
departments of endeavor, 21, 22 

Wayland, Francis, omitted, xvi 

Webster, Daniel, essay on, 00 ; his ge- 
nius, 99 et seq. ; his moral deficiency, 
99 et seq. ; his eloquence, 99; his 
lamentation over the failure of his life, 
100, 101 ; his narrowness and section- 
alism, 101, 102 ; his erratic course con- 
cerning tariffs and national banks, 102 
.•/ seq ; Dartmouth College case, 103, 
10- ,7 seq. ; his moral obliquity illus- 
trated, 103 t7 seq.; his treatment of 
Judge Story, to-? ; his financial dishon- 
esty, [03 et seq. ; accepts a shameless 
gift, 104; birth and education, 104 et 
s,,/. .■ writes Rockingham Memorial, 
threatening secession, 100 ; in Congress 



•432 



•flnfccy 



Webster — Continued. 
opposes government in its hour of dis- 
tress, 106, 107 ; Senator Lodge's com- 
ment, 100 ; his Pilgrim oration, log; 
Ticknor's account of his eloquence, 109, 
110; his influence in creating sentiment 
in behalf of the Union, 110 et seq. ; 
Bunker Hill oration, 1 10 ; his eulogy of 
Adams and Jefferson, 1 10 ; his second 
reply to Hayne, 110, 113, 114; re- 
models criminal law, in; champions 
free trade, III ; becomes Senator, 112; 
supports Jackson against nullification, 
114, 11s; presidential ambition, 117, 
1 18 et seq.; Secretary of State, 118; 
averts war with England, 118; opposes 
Texan annexation, 120; seventh of 
March speech, 123 ; again Secretary of 
State, 123 ; refuses to support Scott's 
candidacy, 123 ; death, 123 ; summary, 
12-,, 124 



West, Benjamin, his fame and the foun- 
dations of it, xii ; his strange omission 
from the list of immortals, 409 
Whitney, Eli, essay on, 400 ; compared 
with Elias Howe, xiii ; birth, 400 ; 
renders valuable service as nail maker 
during Revolution, 400; graduates at ad- 
vanced age of twenty-seven, 400 ; goes 
to Georgia in search of employment as 
tutor, 401 ; develops inventive genius, 
401 ; his supreme invention the cotton- 
gin, 402, 403 ; its beneficence, 403 ; 
robbed of all profit, 403 ; returns to 
New England, establishes armory, and 
achives competence, 40s ; death, 405 ; 
his high claim to enduring fame, 406 
Women, why none were selected, xv 
Woolsey, Theodore D., omitted, xvi 
Wythe, George, his influence over Clay, 
133 ; attitude toward slavery, 133, 
'34 




^r 



